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Om begravningsentreprenörers känsloregler och känslohantering

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to explore how Swedish funeral directors’ emotionally handle the everyday work with death, what feeling rules they are obeyed to and their emotional work in these situations. The study has a symbolic interactionist perspective on emotions and is guided by theoretical tools as; feelings rules, emotional work and frontstage and backstage.  The qualitative study is based on seven in-depth interviews with funeral directors and data was analysed using content analysis. The results show that the funeral directors face several emotionally stressful situations and is guided by different feeling rules. To deal with their feelings, they frontstage they use; cognitive- physical and expressive emotional work but also pay attention to practical tasks. Backstage they talk about difficult experiences with their mates and use humour and laughter as an important emotional vent.