Problematic Expectations: Using Close Reading to Surface Emotional Labor in School Librarian Job Postings

Chinese clinicians face significant emotional labor challenges due to an imbalance in the doctor–patient ratio, long working hours, high regional work stress, and cultural expectations. While research on the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and emotional labor has grown, the specific impact of internal versus external CSR remains unclear. This study aims to explore the differential effects of internal and external CSR on emotional labor, organizational identification (OI), and perceived social support (PSS) among Chinese clinicians, providing insights into how these factors interact to affect clinicians’ emotional well-being. We surveyed clinicians in grade 3A public hospitals across China. Using PLS-SEM with Smart-PLS4, we analyzed 350 valid responses to examine the relationships between internal and external CSR, emotional labor, OI, and PSS. Our findings confirmed that internal CSR negatively affects surface acting and positively affects deep acting (DA), indicating that organizational support fosters authentic emotional engagement rather than superficial emotional responses. The mediating role of OI was also validated, with internal CSR enhancing clinicians’ identification with the organization, reducing emotional dissonance. However, external CSR did not significantly affect either surface or DA, suggesting that social responsibility outside the organization may not directly alleviate emotional labor. The moderating role of PSS was only partially supported, with social support buffering some of the negative effects of emotional labor but not all. This study is significant for policymakers and healthcare managers, as it highlights the critical role of internal CSR in reducing emotional labor among clinicians. The findings suggest that organizations should focus on internal social responsibility practices (such as fostering a supportive work environment and enhancing OI ) to reduce surface acting and promote DA. By doing so, hospitals can create a more sustainable work environment for clinicians, improving their well-being and reducing burnout.

Povijest školskih knjižnica u Dalmaciji počinje u 19. st., kada se one formiraju kao diferencirani i definirani subjekti u okviru sustava obrazovanja u Austro-Ugarskoj Monarhiji. U ovom je radu opisano stanje dalmatinskog pučkog školstva do njegove reforme 1869. i institucionalni okvir djelovanja školskih knjižnica pučkih škola nakon reforme, te je konceptualizirana društvena dimenzija njihova djelovanja. Prikazan je društveni, kulturološki i gospodarski sklop u kojemu su provođene reforme, zakoni i pravilnici kojima je uređen rad knjianica, te se pokušalo procijeniti kulturno stanje na dalmatinskom selu prije i nakon reforme. Pošlo se od teze da je škola, a u sklopu nje i školska knjižnica, modernizacijska ustanova. Kao takva, školska je knjižnica osim obrazovnih i odgojnih imala i šire zadaće koje je definiraju u sklopu modernizacijske tranzicije Dalmacije u drugoj polovici 19. stoljeća. Podloga za takav pristup bila je analiza izabranih referentnih tekstova u stručnoj i drugoj periodici i literatura koja se bavi poviješću školstva u Dalmaciji.O reformi pučkog školstva u Dalmaciji objavljeni su mnogi radovi, ali se organizaciji i djelovanju školskih knjižnica, posebice knjižnica pučkih škola, pridavalo malo pozornosti. Ovaj se rad bavi upravo institucionalnim okvirima izgradnje sustava i uspostave školskih knjižnica u Dalmaciji u sklopu reforme obrazovanja koju je Austro- -Ugarska Monarhija provela u drugoj polovici 19. st., tj. zakonskim i organizacijskim okvirima te konceptualizacijom njihova djelovanja u kontekstu tadašnjih socijalnih prilika.

While scholarly inquiries into Service Sabotage (SS) have received ample attention in the literature of various industries, the role of Emotional Intelligence (EI) and Emotional Dissonance (ED) in employee-customer relations in the context of Environmental Stimuli (ES) in the tourism accommodation sector has remained unexplored. The role of employee–customer interaction in tourism is paramount for a hospitality organization’s growth, sustainability, and profitability. We hypothesized hotel service employees’ EI and ED can be influential factors to SS. Adopting the Mehrabian–Russell model (M–R) and Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) framework as conceptual paradigms, we tested the effect of hotel ambiance on employees’ emotions, which can have significant effects on SS. The study revealed that ES links to behaviors and elicits EI and ED as human emotional responses to environments that have a parallel mediating effect on mitigating or neutralizing the negative effect of SS in an organization. The findings provide important insights into an organization’s awareness of the provision of ES as a positive factor for employees, subsequently forming their behavioral consequences of EI and ED which can mitigate the negative impacts of SS. The study yields important implications on how hospitality organizations should pay attention to the impact of rule-breaking behaviors. Theoretical and practical implications are also discussed.

Guided by the concept of the grey zone, this article explores the role of officially published Slovak literature during the normalization period of state socialism as a site of negotiated critique. It examines how literary works navigated blurred boundaries between ideological conformity and cultural dissent. Rather than directly opposing the regime, many authors strategically adapted or manipulated state-approved cultural codes to challenge official discourse from within. Focusing on late socialist cultural production in Czechoslovakia, the article revisits works by Ján Fekete, Rudolf Sloboda, and Peter Pišťanek, considering their subversive potential. Through close readings, it traces a shift from collective engagement to existential introspection, ecological anxiety, and grotesque parody. These narratives embed civilizational and social critique through subversive irony, emotional dissonance, and ambiguity – tools for expressing discontent while avoiding open resistance. Integrating discourse theory and literary sociology, the study proposes a non-binary model of literary history under authoritarianism. Grey zone literature emerges both as a strategy of cultural survival and a subtle force eroding the socialist cultural canon, with comparative relevance for understanding intellectual life under late socialism.

This paper investigates the evolving landscape of feminist digital activism in India by analysing Instagram posts from three major Indian feminist pages: SheThePeople, ThatDesiFeminist, and Feminism in India. The study asks how digital feminist practices on Instagram construct, contest, and reframe dominant cultural discourses around gender, power, and identity. Employing a multimodal qualitative methodology, it integrates Cultural Discourse Studies (CDS), netnography, and close reading to examine 300 posts as discursive interventions against patriarchal norms relating to marriage, motherhood, public safety, body politics, and emotional labour. CDS offers a culturally grounded framework for reading Instagram posts as communicative acts embedded in broader power-laden discourse systems. Netnography and close reading uncover how visual storytelling, symbolic imagery, and user engagement are mobilised as tools of resistance and feminist meaning-making. The findings show that Indian digital feminist activism is not only reactive to patriarchal backlash but also proactively builds alternative feminist grammars rooted in local sociocultural realities. By foregrounding India as a culturally specific site of feminist meaning-making and extending CDS to multimodal social media discourse, the paper contributes to scholarship on digital feminism beyond the West.

Within scholarly and professional LIS literature, researchers and practitioners have applied the language, theory, and practices of stage performance to the context of academic library instruction. Recognizing the power of discourse in shaping professional norms and values, I wonder: How might the widespread presence of performance-based approaches to library instruction impact assumptions and expectations of those librarians who provide it? To better identify, interrogate, and imagine the implications of this discourse, this article first provides a review of the scholarship that has contributed to and resisted the phenomenon of library-instruction-as-performance, drawing upon the work of researchers who have engaged with theatrical, dramatic, or comedic approaches to library instruction. Using content analysis and close reading, I then analyze recent academic library conference programs to further understand how this thinking has been brought to life through professional development opportunities. Upon discovering a cluster of emotional themes within these texts, I follow how the discourse of performance in library instruction intersects with the concept of emotional labour in libraries, exploring how performance-based approaches can both demand emotional labour from and provide emotional reprieve to instruction librarians. In doing so, I focus on the interplay of professional discourse in library instruction and behavioural expectations of librarians—including their emotional expressions—to better understand how these phenomena co-exist and reinforce one another.

Introduction Kate Adler (bio) and Lisa Sloniowski (bio) Welcome to a weird issue of Library Trends. The work is rife with miscarriages, melancholy, longing, and nostalgia. The writers divulge the personal and explore the political. They examine white supremacy, patriarchy, classism, and colonialism—those complex, hybrid toxicities that spine through our collective circulatory system. Most of the authors rely on methods less familiar to library and information studies (LIS) research, such as autoethnography, close readings of fictional texts and images, and the application of philosophical treatises to complex social questions, rather than using quantitative analysis to gather forms of evidence. A loosening of the epistemological strings can, we hope, intervene upon a set of enmeshed practices in our field that together deploy a sometimes stifling form of LIS-knowledge apparatus. Perhaps, in producing this strange issue we can shake things up a bit, experiment, and pry things open just a little. Afterall, as Leonard Cohen tells us, it is through the cracks that the light gets in. Taken collectively these articles question what counts as evidence in LIS, the concept of evidence itself, and even the idea of libraries themselves as simple representative collections of facts and the evidential. They turn to questions of values rather than value. As editors we felt this expansion of methodological approaches was appropriate to the study of affect in particular and that it takes up the call to action posed by Emily Drabinski and Scott Walter in their editorial for College and Research Libraries where they assert that the debates about method in LIS research complement the epistemological debates in our field as to what constitutes knowledge. As they suggest, Methodology, after all, is methodical. It is inescapably instrumental. When we focus on the question of which method is “best” . . . we invariably privilege the steps we must take to arrive at an answer, rather [End Page 369] than on the extent to which the question is even worth asking or the degree to which a focus in our field on a particular type of question may be limiting our vision of what our work as scholar-practitioners might mean. (2016, 266) This issue of Library Trends enjoins readers to consider new ways of knowing our work, new registers for asking critical questions about how our work operates in the world, and how the world operates on and through us. At any rate—how else to wade through these weird waters, the sticky, murky business of affect? How else to talk about the things just out of sight, the things that propel us in-between what is clearly visible? We have no dispute with social science methods, but like any methodological approach, there are limits to their application. Our issue is filled with complicated questions about messy things, from the personally curious to the structurally untenable. Things that implicate us. Things that make us wonder if we sometimes do more harm than good as librarians. Problems that need to be examined in new ways and from new angles. Our colleagues in archives have begun carefully responding to the generative questions of the affective turn, and we thought it time that librarians did as well. Of course, the first problem is that affect theory actively resists definition. When we released our call for papers, we were heartened by the many excellent proposals received—and chagrined as we began trying to imagine how to weave pieces together. In a terrain marked by disciplines as divergent as neuropsychology and cultural studies, how could we pull together something coherent? Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth gleefully chart the myriad ways affect is used in their introduction to the Affect Studies Reader, settling on the playful “an inventory of shimmers” as the broadest possible description of this interdisciplinary area. Commonly misunderstood as “feelings,” affect is more properly considered a state of in-between-ness, the liminal place where thought, emotion, and embodiment float and intermingle with various forces and intensities propelling us in multiple directions (2010, 2). Affect is not emotion nor is it emotional labor—although emotional labor may well produce affect and is certainly produced by it. Confused yet? Let’s try again. Emotional labor speaks to managing and...

The concept of emotional labour describes the management of emotions as part of everyday work performance. Much of the research in this field has been in relation to jobs in the service sector where (mostly female) employees are required to shape their own feelings in order to make customers or clients feel at ease, comfortable or happy. There has been relatively little attention paid to the importance of emotional labour in professional occupations. This paper examines the emotional labour of magistrates in court. Magistrates must often regulate their own emotions and those of some court users, many of whom are not legally represented and who express a variety of emotions, including anger and distress, and experience social problems that may elicit emotions or emotional responses from the magistrate. The paper reports findings from interviews with over 40 magistrates throughout Australia and begins to address the significance of emotional labour for this branch of the judiciary.

The history of school libraries in Louisiana has, I suppose, been similar to that in other states. The interest in libraries in the high school antedates that in the elementary school, and the development is coming more rapidly in the high schools. Previous to five or six years ago, the book collections in the majority of the high schools consisted largely of standard titles for English collateral reading. In the summer of 1929 the High School Division of the State Department of Education formulated definite standards for the high-school libraries, including a requirement of certain numbers of books to supplement all subjects taught in the schools. Immediately the collections began to be better balanced. Nearly every school provides periodicals. These on the whole are very well selected, and even when the subscription list is limited it is usually well balanced. Books on hobbies, the fine arts, books for extracurricular activities, and reference books other than encyclopedias, dictionary, and World Almanac are still lacking in all except the largest schools. In the summer of 1932 the Standard Catalog for High School Libraries was adopted as the State-approved buying list for the high schools. Any readable book in that Catalog is acceptable for English collateral reading. The range of English collateral books has thus been considerably broadened, and the book collections better rounded since the schools have such an excel-

On LHRT’s Seventy-Fifth Anniversary

The history of Library and Information Science in Pakistan is traced back to the arrival of W. A. Broaden and Asa Don Dickinson to Sub-continent in 1911 and 1916 respectively. This piece of document tends to explore the history of library and library science education, library activities and role of professional associations in promotion of library culture in North-West part of Pakistan. This study is basically historical in nature. The paper is broadly divided into three parts that is library science education, library developments through ages and library associations and their role in the promotion of libraries in Khyber Pakhtunkhawa. Efforts were made to elaborate the growth of libraries in different eras over the passage of time. The role of Muslims and British in the promotion of library culture is also discussed. It is reflected that both nations have made no stone left un-turned for the establishment of libraries in this part of sub-continent. It is also evident from the pages of history that the introduction of Library and Information Science education was not that late here as compared to the rest of the world. University of Punjab is the third in the race of ranking after Germany and United States to offer this program. Various associations had also played their roles in this regard. They had worked hard for the promotion of library culture. The role of Pakistan Library Association (PLA) is observant and praise worthy in the said context. It is concluded that future of libraries and their education is bright in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa as library schools, senior professionals and associations are playing their due role with zeal and favor.

This case study investigates how emotional practices, professional identity, and adaptability shape EFL teachers’ perceptions of a newly implemented school policy promoting emotional intelligence at a subsidized school in Chile. The study is situated within the context of an educational reform in a subsidized school, where teachers are often expected to align with institutional changes that affect their pedagogical and emotional roles. The case focuses on two experienced EFL teachers working at a subsidized school in Quilpué, Chile. Data were collected through three in-depth semi-structured interviews—each centered on one of the study’s core variables: emotions, identity, and adaptability. The content analysis followed Elo and Kyngäs’ (2007) framework to examine how the participants interpreted and responded to the policy shift. Findings reveal that teachers’ perceptions were closely linked to their professional ideologies, emotional responses, and sense of agency. The study highlights the complex relationship between institutional expectations and teachers’ internal processes, emphasizing how power relations, community belonging, and personal values mediate responses to educational reforms. This case emphasizes the importance of considering teachers’ emotional and professional identities when implementing policy changes. It calls for more context-sensitive approaches to reform, particularly in settings where emotional labor and adaptability are central to teachers’ professional self-concept.

Nurses working in the neonatal intensive care units (NICU) have to provide highly technical care to the sick and often terminally ill neonates. More critical the neonate, more stressful their work becomes. But most NICU nurses understand the roles they play in comforting the babies and their parents, and as such their work often satisfies them personally [1]. Transporting a sick newborn from labour room to the NICU, and providing intensive care is an extremely stressful situation, which can occur multiple times during the duty hours. That is why theymust control their emotional responses, at the same time maintaining a high degree of professionalism [2]. Parents of sick babies are often demanding and desperate, and the nurses must learn to interact with them. Emotional labour adds to the physical labour for nurses working in NICU [3, 4]. Most of the time, they are on their feet, and normally work 12h shifts including rotation through day, night and overnight shifts. In addition, they regularly move machines/equipments within the neonatal unit. Some nurses also take classes in addition, which makes the working hours more hectic. In this issue of the Journal, Amin et al. reported the result of a multicenter, cross-sectional study describing about the perceived stress and professional quality of life in NICUs of nine hospitals of major cities of Gujarat [5]. The authors identified 70.5 % nurses as perceiving moderate to high degree of stress, and the perceived stress correlated with professional quality of life domains. Though the findings of the present study are not entirely new, the study is unique of its kind for the following reasons. First, it was conducted in India where the nurse-patient ratio in the NICUs ranges from 1:3 to 1:25, unlike that of a developed country where the ratio is 1:1, except in special situations. Extrapolating the data from developed countries does not truly project the picture in a developing country setting. Second, the authors included a demographic questionnaire, Perceived Stress Scale 14 (PSS14), and Professional Quality of Life Scale Version 5 (ProQOL5), which are the standard methods to study stress and quality of life. Third, the study involved both the government and private hospitals where the nurse-patient ratio in the NICUs varies to a greater extent (the authors found a ratio of 1:4 to 1:8 in the private setups and 1:25 to 1:35 in government sector). The present study falls into the category of ethnographic research, in which the investigator tries to get embedded in the everyday lives of the study group and interact with the participants in their natural settings. In a NICU setting, this would involve observations of the nurses’ behavior while interactions with babies, families, other nurses, and staff members as well as conduction of interviews with nurses and parents. By doing this, the investigator gets a true picture of the burden of the problem, thereby minimizing the bias in the study. A previous ethnographic study by Cricco-Lizza has shown NICU nurses to experience 3 main sources of stress or emotional labour: (a) caring for the babies – a need for constant vigilance, narrow margin for error with preterm babies, dealing with parental anxiety, emotional attachment to the babies, and multitasking; (b) demand from the employer – fear of making mistakes, shortage of manpower and equipment, dealing with new technology, and hectic duty shifts; (c) personal life – experience of nurses who are mothers being closely tied to how they respond to situations in the NICU, anxiety of pregnant nurses about their unborn children, and emotional * M. Jeeva Sankar jeevasankar@aiims.ac.in

Precarity has become a byword for life in late and later capitalism. How do we pay attention to precarity—economic precarity, neoliberal precarity—through a close reading of the performing body? Does the place of the arts in global capitalism, and the particular relations implied by “affective labor” and “creative capital,” mean that we are working and living in the affect factory? What can theatre and performance tell us about this condition?

Legal decision-making aspires to be objective, a principle regarded as foundational to justice, public trust, and the legitimacy of legal outcomes. However, this ideal is often challenged by the reality of human judgment, which is influenced by subjective factors such as emotions, biases, and varying cognitive strategies. This paper investigates the psychological challenges faced by legal professionals in the context of sentencing, drawing on data from studies involving judges and prosecutors in Slovenia. Through workshops, interviews, and focus groups, the research highlights substantial inconsistencies in sentencing practices, even for similar offences. These disparities reveal the limits of objectivity within the judicial process, prompting legal professionals to reflect on the systemic and individual factors driving variability. The analysis focuses on how judges and prosecutors react to these discrepancies, examining a range of emotional and psychological responses—including the rationalization of decisions, the pursuit of consistency through personal “sentencing codes,” and reliance on collegial input to cope with the absence of formal guidelines. The analysis draws on concepts from cognitive dissonance theory, deliberate ignorance, emotional labour, and personality types to explore how professionals reconcile the ideal of objectivity with the imperfections of human judgment. It highlights the profound emotional toll that discrepancies in sentencing can take on decision-makers and how these emotional reactions influence their professional identity and approach to justice. By contextualising these findings within the sociology of emotions, this paper emphasises how the emotional realities of legal professionals shape their responses to perceived failures and impact their capacity to deliver justice. Ultimately, this study aims to foster a deeper understanding of the human aspects of judicial decision-making, underscoring the need for systemic reforms to mitigate disparities, provide support, and promote consistency in sentencing practices.