Smith Yvonne, Colletta Lex, Bender Anna E
School of Social Work, Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics, Syracuse University, 244 White Hall, Syracuse, NY, 13244, USA.
Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, Case Western Reserve University, 11235 Bellflower Road, Cleveland, OH, 44106-7164, USA.
Cult Med Psychiatry. 2019 Mar;43(1):25-55. doi: 10.1007/s11013-018-9594-7.
Paraprofessional youth care workers in residential treatment centers (RTCs) are responsible for the everyday care, supervision, and treatment of youth with serious behavioral and mental health challenges. Turnover rates among this poorly paid workforce are high, and it is not known why individuals seek and maintain youth care work despite its significant challenges. Following anthropologists who study morality as situated practice, we investigate the role of altruism in recruiting and retaining workers in RTCs. We ask: How do managers and youth care workers understand altruism and its role in youth care work and what are the consequences of those understandings? Through organizational ethnography of an RTC, we show that workers and management understood altruism differently. Managers viewed altruism as an inherent trait of some and attributed turnover to its lack. Although workers sometimes enacted this script, they understood themselves as engaged in far more complex situated moral projects in which altruism was only one part. We demonstrate political effects of these differing understandings of altruism, namely, that management deflected institutional critique by viewing it as a sign of workers' immorality. We offer modest recommendations for RTCs seeking to recruit and retain competent youth care workers and address potential new directions for moral anthropology of organizations.
寄宿治疗中心（RTC）的非专业青年护理人员负责照顾、监督和治疗面临严重行为和心理健康挑战的青少年。这支低薪劳动力队伍的离职率很高，尽管这项工作面临重大挑战，但人们并不清楚为何有人会选择并一直从事青年护理工作。跟随将道德视为情境化实践进行研究的人类学家，我们调查了利他主义在RTC招聘和留住员工方面所起的作用。我们提出问题：管理人员和青年护理人员如何理解利他主义及其在青年护理工作中的作用，这些理解会带来什么后果？通过对一家RTC进行组织人种志研究，我们发现员工和管理层对利他主义的理解存在差异。管理人员将利他主义视为某些人的固有特质，并将离职归因于缺乏利他主义。虽然员工有时会按照这种说法行事，但他们认为自己参与的是更为复杂的情境化道德项目，而利他主义只是其中一部分。我们展示了这些对利他主义的不同理解所产生的政治影响，即管理层将机构批评视为员工不道德的表现，从而转移了这种批评。我们为寻求招聘和留住称职青年护理人员的RTC提供了一些适度的建议，并探讨了组织道德人类学的潜在新方向。
