Stress Telephone Operators, threat or challenge?

Abstract

Diverse social and academic sectors have identified stress as a threat to health and have attributed it to technological change. Based on a larger research project on the social construction of stress among a group of female phone operators, in this paper the author suggest that technological change underwent at Telmex is not a causal factor of stress perse. Rather, its expression involves a wide constellation of events not only from the job itself but also from the workers’ personal and family life. She argue’s that stress both represents and expresses individual characteristics of those who suffer from it and therefore of their socio-cultural relations. This poses the challenge of interpreting stress from the subjects’ own perspective in order to identify their responses to events considered stressful as well as to identify the role that job category, genre, age, and social roles play in those responses. To illustrate this, she draws on the narratives of a group of phone operators who describe stress as a physical malaise related to the oppression and unfairness they feel as both workers and women. She also emphasize that the meaning of stress is constructed by synthesizing scientific knowledge and its popular versions which in turn, are based on rumors.