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This article examines the relationship between the organizational structure and ideology of the psychiatric system and the daily actions and subjective experiences of psychiatric nurses. It presents empirical data from an in-depth case study in which psychiatric nurses attempt to deal with the stresses of their work by developing various collective coping strategies which eventually become embedded in the daily routines of the institution, intensifying the very problems they were originally intended to solve. The article is divided into three main sections. The first section examines recent sociological theorizing concerning the contradictory role of the psychiatric system within modern society. The second section presents empirical data illustrating the ways in which the structural contradictions of the psychiatric sector affect the daily lives of all who participate in the system, while the final section discusses the need for organizational level interventions to relieve occupational stress in welfare institutions.

This article examines the implicit assumptions underlying current research into occupational stress and burnout. It argues that the two fields utilize similar theoretical models and research techniques and therefore have a number of problems in common. These problems arise from their common tendency to adopt a psychological perspective which pays insufficient attention to the complexity of the interrelationship between social conditions and subjective experience. The article suggests that both fields could be strengthened by incorporating more sociological concepts and developing analyses of the effects which discrepancies between the manifest and latent functions and surface and deep structures of organizations have on the individual's subjective experiences of work. The value of such analyses is illustrated with three examples of empirical research utilizing this perspective.

This article uses systems psychodynamic concepts to explore the creation and reproduction of gendered inequality within the New Zealand film industry. The article focuses on the ways in which senior film production workers' anxieties about hiring, or working with, women influence the process of assembling project teams. It suggests that the process of choosing team members creates considerable anxiety for both senior film production workers with responsibility for hiring and lower-status team members who need to rely on them to create high-functioning teams. The industry ideal of the autonomous creative worker is implicitly gendered, conforming more closely to traditional concepts of the unencumbered male worker than traditional ideals of femininity and motherhood. The antithesis between these representations creates anxiety, raising unconscious fears that women as a category are less trustworthy workers. Consequently, discriminatory hiring practices that diminish these anxieties become collectively accepted as rational responses to organizational problems and embedded within the social system as collectively endorsed defences against anxiety. Given that project-based employment is temporary, this pattern of discrimination against women is regularly repeated and contributes to entrenched gender inequality within the film industry. Qualitative data from interviews with 12 male and 13 female film production workers is presented to illustrate this analysis.

This article uses the theoretical framework provided by social models of addiction to interpret freelance film production workers' subjective experiences of project-based labour. The article suggests that the structural conditions of project-based labour within the film industry create a subjective experience in which the financial, creative, social and emotional rewards of employment are interspersed with the anxieties of repeated unemployment. The stark contrast between highly gratifying periods in work and highly aversive periods in between work produces an addictive psycho-social dynamic that repeatedly draws freelance production workers back into the industry. This process can only be fully understood by considering the relationship between employment conditions and subjective experiences as an integrated whole. The development of freelance film production workers' addictive relationships with the film industry is illustrated using qualitative data from in-depth interviews with 11 male and 10 female New Zealand freelance film production workers.

This article applies Bateson's concept of the double bind to the interpretation of emergent problems in custodial grandmothers' relationships with their other adult offspring and non-custodial grandchildren. The article suggests that women raising grandchildren are placed in a double bind situation in which the two core family values of caring for family members in need and treating all family members equally are in conflict. This conflict of interests is at the heart of many problems within the intergenerational family context and is experienced as both inescapable and distressing by both grandmothers and their adult children. Brief vignettes from two participants in a small-scale qualitative study of New Zealand custodial grandmothers' lives are presented to illustrate this dynamic.

This research investigated the triangular employment relationship between organizations, temporary staffing agencies, and clerical temporary workers using the conceptual framework of the psychological contract. The rapid growth in triadic employment relationships is well documented; however, there is limited research into the interlocking psychological contracts between the three parties. This research advances our understanding of the mechanisms underlying triangular psychological contracts by drawing attention to the ways in which people's beliefs concerning their own obligations toward others may be incommensurate with their expectations of other parties. Findings are based on semistructured interviews with 10 client organization representatives, 10 staffing agency consultants, and 20 female clerical temporaries working in Auckland, New Zealand. The interviews revealed that the three sets of participants held mutually incompatible expectations, which were shaped by their differing positions and power bases within the temporary labor market. Each group expected, or wanted, the other parties to behave toward them as if a relational psychological contract existed but perceived their obligations toward others in more transactional terms. In consequence, the expectations, goals, and actions of the three sets of participants often conflicted, creating a range of adverse outcomes, which were unintended by, and problematic for, each group within the triangular employment relationship.