Faster, harder, longer, stronger – management at the threshold between work and private life : The case of work place health promotion

This paper studies Work Place Health Promotion at two international corporations as an example of an unobtrusive control that targets employees’ lifestyles. It uses Michel Foucault's concepts of neoliberal governmentality and post-disciplinary control to show how Work Place Health Promotion breaks with the disciplinary logic of control most commonly associated with studies of unobtrusive controls in organizations. While discipline is centripetal, correcting employees’ misconduct so that they freely keep within prescribed norms, Work Place Health Promotion is centrifugal, targeting employees’ lifestyles and promoting those existing faculties and inclinations that may increase their activity, performance and their health. It hereby emerges as less restrictive than organizational discipline, but also as more discriminating. For not only does it subject employees’ lifestyles to an economic logic of investment and disinvestment, it also contributes to an exclusion of employees that fail in this regard in the name of their lack of health

Governing Impaired Jobseekers in Neoliberal Societies : From Sheltered Employment to Individual Placement

Handelsbankens forskningsstiftelse

Occupational Health Services and the Socialization of the post-Fordist Employee

There is a heightened interest in the health of employees among scholars, employers, legislators, and employees themselves. The concern for employees’ health is not a new phenomenon. It has held a central position in political and economic discourses throughout most of the twentieth century. The central argument of this article, however, is that the economic and political changes of the last three decades – the neo-liberal turn – have played a part in altering the very notion of health so that the healthy individual is now a person who not merely passes bio-medical tests, but a person who also leads a particular life and possesses particular skills, namely, those of the active, positive, and self-governing individual. By means of a qualitative study of the sector for occupational health services (OHSs) in Sweden, this article will show how an active lifestyle has become a defining criterion of health. Furthermore, it will describe how health thereby becomes a question of choice and responsibility and how the healthy employee comes across as morally superior to the unhealthy employee. In this connection, this article shows how health experts such as therapists, health coaches, physicians, and so on become important points of authority in the fashioning of the new healthy, active employe

Management in the “neo-paternalistic organization” : The case of worksite health promotion at Scania

This paper proposes a qualitative study of Work Site Health Promotion (WHP) at the large Swedish producer of trucks and buses, Scania. While the concept of WHP implies that it is employees’ improved health at work that is strived for, we suggest that its main area of intervention is neither the work environment, nor what employees do at work, but employees’ lifestyles. To capture the potential of WHP for the management of organization, we introduce the concept of “neo-paternalistic organizational control.” By this term we want to draw attention to how WHP shares paternalistic approaches’ tendency of disregarding the professional-private divide, while also drawing attention to how this extra-professional control dimension is at once less intrusive and more discriminatory than what is traditionally referred to as paternalism in the literature on managerial control

Amateur Observers Witness the Return of Venus’ Cloud Discontinuity

Firstly identified in images from JAXA’s orbiter Akatsuki, the cloud discontinuity of Venus is a planetary-scale phenomenon known to be recurrent since, at least, the 1980s. Interpreted as a new type of Kelvin wave, this disruption is associated to dramatic changes in the clouds’ opacity and distribution of aerosols, and it may constitute a critical piece for our understanding of the thermal balance and atmospheric circulation of Venus. Here, we report its reappearance on the dayside middle clouds four years after its last detection with Akatsuki/IR1, and for the first time, we characterize its main properties using exclusively near-infrared images from amateur observations. In agreement with previous reports, the discontinuity exhibited temporal variations in its zonal speed, orientation, length, and its effect over the clouds’ albedo during the 2019/2020 eastern elongation. Finally, a comparison with simultaneous observations by Akatsuki UVI and LIR confirmed that the discontinuity is not visible on the upper clouds’ albedo or thermal emission, while zonal speeds are slower than winds at the clouds’ top and faster than at the middle clouds, evidencing that this Kelvin wave might be transporting momentum up to upper clouds