SOME THINGS CAN NEVER BE UNSEEN: THE ROLE OF CONTEXT IN PSYCHOLOGICAL INJURY AT WAR

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: De Rond, Mark; Lok, Jaco
• 署名单位: University of Cambridge; University of New South Wales Sydney
• 刊物名称: ACADEMY OF MANAGEMENT JOURNAL
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0001-4273
• DOI: 10.5465/amj.2015.0681
• 发表日期: 2016
• 页码: 1965-1993
• 关键词: mental-health; INSTITUTIONAL WORK; COPING STRATEGIES; MILITARY FORCES; ARMED-FORCES; DIRTY WORK; stress; deployment; trauma; personnel

摘要

Recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have reignited debates on how to prevent and manage psychological injury among returning troops. These debates point to the psychological cost of war as a grand challenge whose scale and complexity stretch far beyond the already large and growing number of veterans affected. We use a unique ethnography of a military medical team's tour of duty in Camp Bastion, Afghanistan, to explore the role of institutional context as a contributing factor to psychological injury from war. We find that exposure to war and its consequences invokes sustained experiences of senselessness, futility, and surreally that are partially rooted in cultural expectations, professional role identity, and organizational protocol, and can threaten people's existential grounding in this institutional context. We argue that what makes work at war traumatic for some and not others is likely affected by the specific context through which people filter, frame, and cope with their experience. A contextual understanding of psychological injury at war that is based in organizational research can thus form an important part of better addressing this grand challenge.