Being occupied: An embodied re-reading of organizational ‘wellness’

an article by Karen Dale (Lancaster University, UK) and Gibson Burrell (University of Leicester, UK) published in Organization Volume 21 Number 2 (March 2014)

Abstract

‘Organisational 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 organisational interests.

In this article we re-read the discourse of this ‘movement’ through the lens of ‘organised embodiment’. We argue that organisational 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 organised 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 organisation. Thus, our organisational experiences produce an embodied individual who is ‘fit’ for purpose in a rather more circumscribed fashion than prevailing discourses of wellness might suggest.

---