Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant: Burnout: The Epistemologies of a Modern Condition

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This project investigates ‘burnout’ at work as a category of experience and object of inquiry in science, organizational design, and culture. Blending insights from science and technology studies on scientific classification processes, organizational design, and knowledge workers, it asks three main research questions: What epistemic, political, and institutional changes account for shifts in the ways that burnout has been conceptualized and addressed? How do actors make claims about burnout? Why has the concept of burnout become crucial to efforts to maintain well-being within the workforce? These questions will be answered using a mixed-methods research design blending archival research, ethnography, interviews, and participant workshops to investigate three case studies: the early history of burnout research, a group who study burnout among healthcare workers, and a group of software developers experiencing burnout. Broader impacts include holding participatory workshops among stakeholders to inform them about their condition and generate knowledge about how burnout manifests in individual, interpersonal, and institutional contexts.This project synthesizes data from multiple qualitative research methods to understand the phenomena of ‘burnout’ within the modern workplace. Data from historical archival research, ethnographic observations, and participatory focus groups are triangulated to understand the causes and consequences of burnout within the modern workforce, and how the concept of burnout has undergone cultural, political, and historical transformations. Documentary analysis of the early history of burnout research enables understanding of how the concept of burnout has changed over time. Participant observation of a university-based research group who studies burnout among healthcare workers allows for understanding of how burnout affects physicians and how interventions are developed to deal with it. Ethnographic observations among information technology workers who develop open source software facilitates deeper understanding of how workers define and deploy the notion of burnout in non-medical contexts. Taken together, this project advances the current state of knowledge about burnout in science and technology studies and social and cultural studies of work.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.