abstract: 'Considerable research on the experiences of contemporary workers

  theorizes everyday acts of resistance as inconsequential, emphasizing

  their limited impact on overarching structures of inequality. This

  chapter offers a different perspective. Drawing on a feminist

  interpretivist paradigm, I argue that such characterizations of everyday

  resistance fail to account for the ways in which workers themselves make

  sense of power dynamics at work. Incorporating such accounts complicates

  conventional understandings of low-income workers engaged in everyday

  resistance as either dupes, as is often suggested by academic research,

  or schemers, as is frequently articulated by the self-perceived targets

  of worker rule-breaking - their managers. Based on 10 months of

  ethnographic observation and interviews with nurses and nursing

  assistants in a long-term care facility, I demonstrate that while

  workers recognize the constraints within which they act, they

  nonetheless make sense of their acts of everyday resistance as defiant.

  The realities of precarious labor and family responsibility do not

  combine to prevent resistance at work for these women; they combine to

  transform it. Asserting their agency through a series of relatively

  mundane and covert acts that gain them autonomy and dignity, workers

  readily acknowledge their policy refusals while at the same time

  recognizing the factors that shape them. Describing subversions of

  authority as strategic collaborations, the constrained agency these

  workers articulate hinges on their own and their coworkers'' identities

  not just as workers, but in many cases as low-income working mothers.'
affiliation: 'Crocker, J (Corresponding Author), SUNY Coll Old Westbury, Sociol, Old
  Westbury, NY 11568 USA.

  Crocker, Jillian, SUNY Coll Old Westbury, Sociol, Old Westbury, NY 11568 USA.'
author: Crocker, Jillian
author_list:
- family: Crocker
  given: Jillian
booktitle: 'OPPRESSION AND RESISTANCE: STRUCTURE, AGENCY, TRANSFORMATION'
da: '2023-09-28'
doi: 10.1108/S0163-239620180000048011
editor: Musolf, GR
files: []
isbn: 978-1-78743-167-6
issn: 0163-2396
keywords: Agency; care work; everyday resistance; nursing assistants; work-family
keywords-plus: CULTURE; JOB
language: English
number-of-cited-references: '38'
pages: 157-173
papis_id: 45c8415dec6198706bcab6d030534c06
ref: Crocker2017dupeschemer
series: Studies in Symbolic Interaction
times-cited: '0'
title: 'DUPE, SCHEMER, MOTHER: NAVIGATING AGENCY AND CONSTRAINT AT WORK'
type: article
unique-id: WOS:000438616000009
usage-count-last-180-days: '0'
usage-count-since-2013: '2'
volume: '48'
web-of-science-categories: Sociology
year: '2017'