Summary
The chapter Protecting the Routine from Chaos out of Daniel Chambliss’s book …show more content…
Chambliss describes the common themes he found during his decade-long observations of Nurses and Doctors in Hospitals around the USA and other countries. The primary focus is how nurses, to avoid chaos, routinize work that to outsiders would find disgusting and horrifying but, at the same time, struggle to sustain a sense of caring and patient-oriented responsibility. Chambliss describes four ways that nurses deal with the pressures of their job, and although every hospital and ward deal with different emergencies the social order and the organization's dynamics remain constant. First, nurses and members of the staff keep outsiders out, which they use to protect staff from outside interference. For instance, Chambliss mentions nurses restrictions on visiting hours to help patients but also to keep visitors out of the nurse's way, prevent too many obstructive questions, and most importantly keep visitors from seeing the messy and often tragic incidents that are happening daily. Next Chambliss discusses the hospital staff’s ability to maintain regular rituals under stressful situations to maintain normality; this is done …show more content…
In this article, Chambliss explains the hospital's social order through the four steps medical professionals take to keep order, avoid chaos, and routinize their work. To understand the social order, and how various hospital functions collaborate to create an organizational dynamic, we must first realize how it relates to sociological theory functionalism. Functionalism provides a well-rounded argument around social order; it spotlights the importance of systemic influences on individual conduct and questions beliefs that people can control their social existence. In a hospital, we can exercise this theory because one event happening on a hospital ward can affect the other happenings. Take Chambliss's example of an emergency or code happening, and while some nurses are flustered, they ignore the routinized. However, functionalism assumes that the social systems have the power to shape individual behavior and personality. This is disproven by the large variety of unique characters within the medical staff and is seen through the degrees in which the team can stay calm during