Flexible austerity: Negotiating the unequal effects of resource shortages in racialized organizations (Record no. 528930)
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| 000 -LEADER | |
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| fixed length control field | 02094nam a22001457a 4500 |
| 008 - FIXED-LENGTH DATA ELEMENTS--GENERAL INFORMATION | |
| fixed length control field | 250203b ||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d |
| 100 ## - MAIN ENTRY--PERSONAL NAME | |
| Personal name | Brewer, Alexandra |
| 245 ## - TITLE STATEMENT | |
| Title | Flexible austerity: Negotiating the unequal effects of resource shortages in racialized organizations |
| 260 ## - PUBLICATION, DISTRIBUTION, ETC. (IMPRINT) | |
| Place of publication, distribution, etc | American Sociological Review |
| 300 ## - PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION | |
| Extent | 89(5), Oct, 2024: p.820-848 |
| 520 ## - SUMMARY, ETC. | |
| Summary, etc | Resource shortages unfold unequally, often affecting the most socially disadvantaged people and exacerbating preexisting inequalities. Given that most resources are obtained through organizations, what role do organizational processes play in amplifying inequalities during shortages? I argue that workers engage in a practice I term flexible austerity. Flexible austerity describes how resource shortages become opportunities for decision-makers to more readily rationalize unequal resource allocation. I develop this concept by drawing on an ethnography of an urban academic hospital and leveraging data from before and during a nationwide shortage of medical intravenous (IV) opioids. I show that prior to this shortage, clinicians disproportionately assessed Black patients’ pain as “undeserving” of IV opioids, but they allocated these resources liberally because they felt constrained by evidence-based clinical best practices guidelines. During the shortage, clinicians constructed resource scarcity as necessitating austerity practices when treating Black patients, yet they exercised flexibility with White patients. This widened care disparities in ways that may have been detrimental to Black patients’ health. Based on these findings, I argue that resource shortages amplify inequalities in organizations because they provide new “colorblind” justifications for withholding resources that allow workers to link ideas of deservingness to allocation decisions.- Reproduced https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00031224241282307 |
| 650 ## - SUBJECT ADDED ENTRY--TOPICAL TERM | |
| Topical term or geographic name as entry element | Organizations, Inequality, Race, Medical sociology, Opioids. |
| 9 (RLIN) | 50507 |
| 773 ## - HOST ITEM ENTRY | |
| Main entry heading | American Sociological Review |
| 942 ## - ADDED ENTRY ELEMENTS (KOHA) | |
| Item type | Articles |
| Withdrawn status | Lost status | Source of classification or shelving scheme | Damaged status | Not for loan | Permanent location | Current location | Date acquired | Serial Enumeration / chronology | Barcode | Date last seen | Koha item type |
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| Indian Institute of Public Administration | Indian Institute of Public Administration | 2025-02-03 | 89(5), Oct, 2024: p.820-848 | AR135125 | 2025-02-03 | Articles |