Occupational Identification and Assimilation of Pain Work: (Re)Conceptualizing the Experience of Pain at Work as an Embodied, Co-Constructed Process
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study examines how professional aerial acrobats are socialized to navigate pain as a feature of their occupational identity. Drawing from qualitative interview and arts-based elicitation data from 27 professional aerialists, this study advances organizational communication and body work scholarship by introducing the concept of pain work as a new sub-category of body work. Pain work is a communicative, embodied practice through which workers sustain, endure, and manage pain as a hallmark of occupational identification. The study theorizes a four-phase cyclical process model of pain work to illustrate how the meaning of pain is co-constructed through organizational assimilation. Images provided by participants highlight the material-symbolic interplay of d/Discourse and embodiment. We contribute to broader discussions on the commodification of body work and the need to critically analyze physical conduits of identification at work. Limitations and future directions are discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".