Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Being occupied
T2 - an embodied re-reading of organizational ‘wellness’
AU - Dale, Karen
AU - Burrell, Gibson
PY - 2014/3
Y1 - 2014/3
N2 - ‘Organizational wellness’ has become a high profile issue for businesses. We argue that a ‘wellness movement’ has sprung up around a particular coalescence of economic, ideological and organizational interests. In this article we re-read the discourse of this ‘movement’ through the lens of ‘organized embodiment’. We argue that organizational wellness operates as a rhetorical device which masks contradictory power relations. It serves to hide differential occupational effects and opportunities for workers, and obscures the relationship between wellness and its necessary Other, unwellness. The article suggests that employee unwellness is often produced—and required—by the different forms of organized embodiment that arise directly from occupations and employment. It analyses this corporeal ‘occupation’ in terms of the extortion, exchange and embrace of our bodies to the coercive, calculative and normative power of the organization. Thus, our organizational experiences produce an embodied individual who is ‘fit’ for purpose in a rather more circumscribed fashion than prevailing discourses of wellness might suggest.
AB - ‘Organizational wellness’ has become a high profile issue for businesses. We argue that a ‘wellness movement’ has sprung up around a particular coalescence of economic, ideological and organizational interests. In this article we re-read the discourse of this ‘movement’ through the lens of ‘organized embodiment’. We argue that organizational wellness operates as a rhetorical device which masks contradictory power relations. It serves to hide differential occupational effects and opportunities for workers, and obscures the relationship between wellness and its necessary Other, unwellness. The article suggests that employee unwellness is often produced—and required—by the different forms of organized embodiment that arise directly from occupations and employment. It analyses this corporeal ‘occupation’ in terms of the extortion, exchange and embrace of our bodies to the coercive, calculative and normative power of the organization. Thus, our organizational experiences produce an embodied individual who is ‘fit’ for purpose in a rather more circumscribed fashion than prevailing discourses of wellness might suggest.
KW - Bio-economism
KW - biopower
KW - occupation
KW - organizational wellness
KW - organized embodiment
KW - unwellness
KW - well-being
KW - wellness movement
U2 - 10.1177/1350508412473865
DO - 10.1177/1350508412473865
M3 - Journal article
VL - 21
SP - 159
EP - 177
JO - Organization
JF - Organization
SN - 1350-5084
IS - 2
ER -