The Normalisation of Violence Against Workers in Aged Care Facilities: The Views of Managers, Nurses and Personal Care Assistants

Abstract

For nurses and personal care assistants (PCAs), working in aged care facilities, incidents of violence are considered common place and even accepted as part of the job. Importantly, non-physical violence often demonstrated in use of the power through managers' domination over employees, known as symbolic violence, may explain the lack of systematic and efficacious management of workplace violence. We take a qualitative approach to examine violence in aged care facilities in Australia by conducting semi-structured interviews with 60 participants. We employ Bourdieu's theory of practice (1977) and examine the social structure, the use of capital, and rules of the workplace to understand the use of symbolic violence toward nurses and PCAs, and subsequent impact on workplace violence. The study reports that HR departments are fundamentally ineffectual, and managers prioritise fiscal outcomes and fail to support nurses and PCAs, all contributing to symbolic violence. In effect, nurses and particularly PCAs have no choice but to allow managers to perpetuate symbolic violence because of the existential power imbalance. From the perspectives of workers, there is lack of systemic HRM and management responses to prevent and manage the effects of workplace violence. Our theoretical contribution to the HRM literature extends beyond the context of our study to more completely understand the tensions within Bourdieu's theory and the interconnections between the hierarchy, managers, HR departments and workers. By understanding such complexities, we shed new light on the process of how symbolic violence is used to dominate workers.