Countervailing powers in the labor room: The doula–doctor relationship in the United States

How do health professionals with fundamentally different philosophies toward health, and different status levels, manage power in their work relationships? This paper argues that taking a negotiated order interactionist approach, which contends that the social order shapes behavior but is continuously negotiated through social interactions, and synthesizing it with a countervailing powers perspective can yield insight into the power dynamics between health professionals. It focuses on the birth field, with attention to the relationship between two very different types of birth professionals: obstetricians and doulas. Unlike doctors, who maintain a dominant place in health care and subscribe to a biomedical perspective of birth, doulas hold a low-status position and take a holistic approach toward birth, which may cause conflict in the labor room. In-depth interviews with 43 birth doulas based in the US (May–July 2018) found that the doula–doctor relationship is a complex story of power, deference, and countervailing responses. Doulas reported that doctors are more receptive to them now than in the past but that this is an outcome of creative countervailing responses involving deferential maneuvers and direct challenges to physician authority. Doulas’ strategic management of their relationships with health professionals has allowed them entry to the hospital, permitting them to represent a holistic voice in the labor room. A minority of doulas have begun to develop relationships with doctors that constitute a collaborative approach toward birth care, indicating that changes in standard care are possible. By revealing how a subordinate actor can challenge physicians and effect change in care, this study contributes to scholarship seeking to understand the nature of unequal relationships between health professionals in a context of biomedical dominance.