Fitter, happier, more productive: govering working bodies through wellness

Culture and Organization, June 2005, Vol. 11(2), pp. 125–138

Fitter, Happier, More Productive: Governing Working Bodies through Wellness DAVID MCGILLIVRAY* Division of Media, Culture and Leisure Management, Glasgow Caledonian University, Cowcaddens Road, Glasgow, G4 0BA, UK Culture 10.1080/14759550500091036 GSCO109086.sgm 1475-9551 Original Taylor 202005 11 Division DavidMcGillivray 0141 dmcg@gcal.ac.uk 00000June 331 and & &Article of Francis 8464 Organization (print)/1477-2760 Francis Media, 2005 Group Ltd Culture Ltdand (online) Leisure ManagementGlasgow Caledonian UniversityCowcaddens RoadGlasgowG4 0BA

Over the last two decades wellness discourses have had a particularly powerful influence on advanced western societies. Some of the discourses have found their way into the corporate realm and these provide the primary focus of this paper. Whereas the focus upon unruly bodies remains a force of continuity with the concerns of 19th century paternalistic industrialists, in contemporary organisational wellness initiatives, working bodies are urged and supported to govern their own productive capacities, both in and outside of work. However, drawing on Foucault’s ideas of governmentality and the subject, I propose in this paper that such discourses of organisational wellness cannot simply be seen as transformative and performative. Rather, these discourses encounter employee conflict, contestation and resistance which prevent the translation of macro wellness messages into concrete effects at the local, organisational level. In order to identify and give voice to the various subject positions emerging through discourses of organisational wellness a spectrum of self-governance is developed.

Key words: Foucault; Governmentality; Organizational Wellness; Workplace Health; Project of the Self

INTRODUCTION From its beginnings in the eighteenth century as the paternalistic concern for the health (and therefore productivity) of its workforce, capital has managed to transform the body of the contemporary…worker into the perfect model of self-discipline…in short, one must exude health, energy and vitality. This healthy body must moreover, be obtained by individual effort and achievement.

Holliday and Thompson (2001: 123)

This paper explores a relatively new area of academic inquiry: that of organisational wellness.

Over the last two decades, discourses of wellness have become a particularly powerful influence in advanced Western societies. This is signified by Leichter’s (1997: 361) comment that ‘Susan Sontag had it only half right; wellness, as well as illness, is metaphor in American society…it symbolizes a secular state of grace’. For Leichter, and a growing band of followers, wellness affirms virtuousness, achievable through a preoccupation with fitness and health. The common message is one of being, or becoming more ‘well’ and, by implication, fitter, happier, and more productive. Although wellness now extends to a variety of social spaces, it is its location in the corporate realm that is the primary focus of this particular discussion.

Quantifying the growth of wellness in work contexts is more problematic, although there has been progress in this respect over the last decade. Both Aldana (1998) and Haynes, Dunnagan, and Smith (1999) suggest that numerous public and private organisations have

*E-mail: dmcg@gcal.ac.uk

ISSN 1475-9551 print; ISSN 1477-2760 online © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd DOI: 10.1080/14759550500091036

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implemented worksite wellness initiatives (hereafter termed organisational wellness) as a tool to contain healthcare costs. Similarly, Opatz (1994: vii) remarks that the wellness movement is here to stay as ‘business, industry and government’ are led towards a ‘more rational approach to disease prevention and control of healthcare costs’. Furthermore, a cursory glance of both the lay press and professional journals indicates a significant growth in the number of articles about workplace health promotion and worksite wellness (Atkinson, 2001; Connell and Grainger, 2002; Dishman et al., 1998; Foley, Maxwell, and McGillivray, 1999; Glasgow, McCaul, and Fisher, 1993; Grant and Brisbin, 1992; Grundemann and van Vuuren, 1997; Hunnicutt, 2001; Springett and Dugdill, 1995).

Nevertheless, until recently, limited academic attention has been paid to this subject and, that little which has, tends to be dominated by positivist and functionalist analyses. These analyses concentrate on identifying interventions which will improve the efficiency and effectiveness of organisational wellness initiatives (Chu et al., 2000; Kerr, Griffiths, and Cox, 1996; Shephard, 1996; Wilkinson, 1999), rather than exploring how (and why) these discourses of wellness have come to infiltrate organisational settings. In avoiding an overly functionalist or positivist analysis, this paper proposes an alternative analytical framework drawing on Michel Foucault’s (1972, 1973, 1977, 1978, 1986) ideas of governmentality and the subject central to his ‘later’ period (Moss, 1998). This analysis will consider more closely how organisational wellness practices have emerged and been sustained, as opposed to how organisations can become more ‘well’ per se.

For definitional clarity, discourses of organisational wellness are taken to encompass both the language and practices (the said and the seen) which institutionalise workplace health promotion programmes in organisational settings. Most obviously, the sorts of initiatives considered incorporate various health-related topics, ranging from health and safety, smoking and alcohol issues, to healthy eating policies and the promotion of exercise (Docherty, Fraser, and Hardin, 1999). This paper is particularly interested in the latter; health and fitness facilities and ancillary services situated in work environments. Furthermore, each initiative has in common an emphasis on the working body. First, it is necessary to delineate the key elements of the Foucauldian analytical approach being utilised.

FOUCAULT, GOVERNMENTALITY, AND THE SUBJECT Over the last decade, the ideas emerging from Foucault’s later period have become more influential in the organisation studies terrain (Moss, 1998). This later work has become popular as it extends his earlier analysis of power beyond its overly negative conceptualisation of disciplinary society (Katz, 2001). Foucault’s earlier ideas faced criticism for their structuralist leanings and failure to offer meaningful space for freedom from the effects of power relations. The later Foucault, by contrast, is recognisable in the greater emphasis given over to practices of self-subjectification, or Care of the Self (Foucault, 1986), whereby subjects operate on their own bodies and reflexively choose how to live given the ‘minefield of choice’ (Trethewey, 1999: 427) available to them. In this period, Foucault emphasised the possibility of glimpsing beyond the contingencies that ‘have made us’ (Danaher, Schirato, and Webb, 2000: 30) and sought to counter claims of docility produced through disciplinary society (see also Grey, 1994).

Foucault’s concern to focus upon governmentality and the subject (Rose, 1999) is of particular relevance to this discussion of organisational wellness as it offers space for a reflexive subject rather than the disciplined, dominated one emerging from his earlier work (see Jackson and Carter, 1998; Hoskin, 1998). The concept of governmentality refers to the management of populations at both the societal (macro) and individual (micro) levels, linked

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by an ‘overarching rationale of management’ (Jackson and Carter, 1998: 49). One key site where such a governmental rationality (Gordon, 1991) is apparent is in the management of labour and the organisation of work.

Governmentality is marked out in the space for resistance to directive strategies and policies permitted, achieved through the enactment of micro strategies. Linked to this engagement with governmentality is the concern with subjectivity (Janover, 1997), on ‘how a human being turns him- or herself into a subject’ (Foucault, 1982: 208). The focus on the subject was a constant source of interest across Foucault’s writings. In fact, McHoul (1997: 774) argues that ‘almost all of Foucault’s major texts ask questions about the subject and its historical processes of formation’. The issue of subjectivity has influenced a number of organisation studies articles over the last decade and a half (Bahnisch, 2000; Brewis, Hampton, and Linstead, 1997; Knights and Willmott, 1989; Newton, 1998; Sosteric, 1996; Trethewey, 1999). This paper considers the extent to which particular dominant organisational discourses constitute subject positions and how the knowing subject may reflexively interpret and resist particular contingent organisational truths (e.g. around organisational wellness).

Foucault’s later writings have been subjected to significant critique. Critics argue that the focus on subjectivity simply opens up a space for organisations to act upon ‘subjects of responsibility, autonomy and choice’ (du Gay, 2000: 168) and then shape their freedom for organisational ends. This criticism follows organisational Foucauldians (Newton, 1998: 415) around, charged as they are with an abandonment of the critical project in their (apparent) denial of the exploitative employment relationship (Thompson and Ackroyd, 1995).

Similarly, it is argued that they fail to provide a clear emancipatory and normative political position (Grice, 1997) and, as a result, fall into the trap of neo-conservatism in their emphasis on interpretation over direction for action.

However, in response, the use of Foucault’s writing on the subject in the organisational territory provides an antidote to the apparent loss of the subject from organisational theorising in favour of exposing asymmetrical power relations within the capitalist labour process. Those theorists focusing on the subjective dimensions of the labour process (Jackson and Carter, 1998; McKinlay and Starkey, 1998) instead seek to illustrate how subject positions are discursively produced, rejecting the picture of a unified, pre-given subject category offered by an ‘ideology’ critique (Parker, 2002).

This paper provides an analysis of the opportunities for subjectivity existing within the workplace, focusing on the phenomenon of organisational wellness. This task requires discussion of resistance to be brought to the fore. Foucault’s conception of power relied upon a ‘multiplicity of points of resistance which play the role of adversary, target, support or handle within power relations’ (Burrell, 1988: 228). So, rather than the docile working body simply being caught within networks of disciplinary power unable to escape, the presence of contestation, conflict and resistance is constant, reflecting the imperfections of power rather than the assumption that human beings are simply the ‘product’ of some ‘coherent regime of domination that produces persons in the form of which it dreams’ (du Gay, 2000: 181).

The following discussion provides a response to criticism of the subject as a discursively generated fantasy in Foucault’s work. Although accepting that individuals are constituted to some extent as subjects through governmental practices of power and normalisation which form ideas of subjectivity, Foucault did not simply see this as producing docile bodies as ‘helpless objects formed and moved by power’ (Danaher et al., 2000: 128). Rather, he stressed the ability to respond and resist, and to interpret these processes differently. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which those normalising truths forged around organisational wellness (e.g. fitness, healthy eating, non-smoking) are re-interpreted by employees.

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Finally, responding to criticism over the lack of emancipatory politics and a normative stance, it is argued that it remains worthwhile to illustrate the basis of claims to truth (e.g. those put forward in organisational wellness initiatives) without providing explicit directions for action or engaging in emancipatory politics. As Foucault (1980: 83) stresses, there is merit in entertaining ‘the claims to attention of local, discontinuous, disqualified, illegitimate knowledges’, especially in challenging the ‘centralising powers…linked to the institution and functioning of an organised scientific discourse’ (ibid.). Discourses of organisational wellness are increasingly given medical legitimacy within organisational settings and they work to disqualify certain knowledges in favour of others. Whilst the formation of claims to truth around discourses of organisational wellness are outlined, local discursivities will also be brought forward to illustrate the imperfections of these truth claims in the everyday experiences of working bodies. However, it is first necessary to outline the historical conditions of possibility from which organisational wellness emerged. Only by reflecting on the development of industrial capitalism can the contemporary context of organisational wellness be understood. For this reason, the next section concentrates on the late 19th and early 20th century.

HISTORICISING ORGANISATIONAL WELLNESS: MORALISING DISCIPLINARY INTERVENTIONS Although documented in company histories for over two centuries, recreational activities located in the work environment have been afforded scant attention in the organisation studies literature. Yet, from as early as the 17th century, with the Clyde shipbuilders (Burton, 1994) and Lanarkshire miners (Campbell, 1979), some evidence of employer-sponsored recreational provision is apparent. At the time, these employers provided an informal representation of the formalised wellness schemes now established in many organisations across the UK and abroad (Griffiths, 1996a).

The period of industrial capitalism represents the most significant history of employer interventions, when so-called paternalistic, ‘enlightened’ 19th century industrialists consistently provided recreational opportunities connected to the workplace. For some commentators (see Bailey, 1978) this provision by philanthropic employers was a reaction to the emergent middling (or meddling) classes’ public health concerns about the mass of workers emerging from rural poverty. The workplace was seen as a place where more wholesome and enlightening forms of recreation could be provided, contrasting starkly with the traditional pastimes of the urban working classes of the time—those involving alcohol, cruelty to animals and extended absence from work (e.g. Saint Monday). Others argue that the working body has ‘long been a preoccupation of capitalists’ (Holliday and Thompson, 2001: 123), concerned with the moral and physical health of workers.

To this end, these organisational interventions have been variously interpreted as a means of controlling and disciplining ‘unruly’ bodies (Holliday and Thompson, 2001), reflecting Foucault’s (1977) view that disciplinary regimes regulate populations through ‘a synaptic regime of power, a regime of its existence within the social body, rather than from above it’ (Foucault, 1980: 39). Emerging in the prisons, such a disciplinary mode of domination was replicated in other organisational forms, including workplaces (Burrell, 1988).

The recreational choices of the industrial workforce provide examples of where disciplinary power ‘reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes’ (Foucault, 1980: 39). In keeping with recreational provision in non-work contexts at the time, industrialists provided parklands, public baths and gardens (e.g.

Rowntrees, Robert Owen, Cadbury’s) directed towards the working body and its possibilities.

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These industrialists were part of the ‘Rational Recreation’ movement of the late 19th century (Bailey, 1978), a movement which sought to internalise particular norms and values concerning appropriate, ‘rational’ recreational activity. Norms for recreational participation were established and policed and some employers institutionalised these disciplinary mechanisms.

In the workplace, the relationships that employees had to the activities of work, including working conditions and reward standards, were also organised to ensure the good health and orderly habits of the worker (Townley, 1994). For instance, workplace schemes were developed which introduced the idea of the individual as a ‘productive subject’ (ibid.: 126), in the process extending the organisational gaze to the private realm (Bordo, 1993). Welfare workers acted as the key ‘judges of normality’ (Foucault, 1977: 304) acting as go-betweens, ‘establishing links between the workplace, the home and the cultural milieu’ (Rose, 1990: 63).

These interventions are most clearly demonstrated by the Ford Motor Company’s Sociology Department (Meyer, 1996), where inspectors intervened in the private lives of their workers to ensure they were living suitably stable and puritanical lifestyles. Foucault’s notion of the disciplinary society is reflected in the early history of workplace provision when a range of judges of normality surveyed the behaviour of industrial workforces in both their everyday social settings and in some workplaces.

FROM COLLECTIVE SOLIDARITY TO THE PROJECT OF THE SELF Another feature of early organisational involvement in recreational provision was the focus on collective activities such as team sports and social clubs (Moorhouse, 1989). Although an indirect by-product of these early examples of wellness, health enhancement was neither the primary aim nor outcome. By contrast, over the last three decades, the concerns of health enhancement and risk reduction have come to the fore as the focus of recreational provision located in the workplace (and beyond). As a result, the type of recreational practices and their organisational uses thereafter have also changed.

For example, in the last 30 years, there has been a decrease in the number of organisations providing employees with access to facilities for team sports (e.g. playing fields). Most often, this form of provision has been replaced by an investment in health and fitness facilities.

These facilities are often accompanied by the appointment of a designated health and fitness instructor, focusing attention of the health status of employees (Docherty et al., 1999; Griffiths, 1996b; Holliday and Thompson, 2001).

As Griffiths (1996b: 2) argues: From relatively modest beginnings at the start of the twentieth century…by the mid 1970s industrial sports and social clubs had become more commonplace…however…in North America, a change of emphasis from leisure to fitness programmes in such clubs began to take place in the 1960s…rather than helping employees play sports within the social club context, North American employers became increasingly concerned about promoting employee fitness…this pattern was followed in the UK.

Griffiths’ comments not only allude to a change in the type of recreational activity offered to employees (e.g. from sports and social clubs to health and fitness facilities), but also to the changing purpose of provision. Central to this discursive and material shift is the emergence of the language of ‘health’ and ‘wellness’ and a focus on the ‘body’ as the target of interventions. In this respect, Chu et al. (2000) concur with Griffiths, arguing that the early 1980s saw a major increase in the number of organisations providing wellness programmes concentrated on the modification of employees’ lifestyle behaviour. Some commentators (see, for instance, Wicken, 2000) have suggested that these organisational wellness initiatives merely reflect the amplification of disciplinary techniques at work, whereas others argue that they are concerned with promoting both the physical and mental aspects of employee health and

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enhancing, ‘it is assumed, organisational productivity’ (Townley, 1994: 127). Certainly, several recent studies have revealed close links between the promotion of ‘active workers’ and productivity gains (Fielding, 1990; Holliday and Thompson, 2001; Kerr et al., 1996; Shephard, 1996).

THE QUEST FOR WELLNESS: CONSTRUCTING PRODUCTIVE SUBJECTS Central to the perceived linkage between active workers and productivity gains is the reconceptualisation of the workplace as a key setting where a particular form of health rationality, or ‘particular truths and logics about healthy living’ (Fullager, 2002: 70) are disseminated. So, as Chu et al. (2000: 155) suggest, ‘the workplace, along with the school, hospital, city, island and marketplace…is one of the priority settings for health promotion into the 21st century’. Accordingly: It has become clear that promoting health and quality of life cannot be the responsibility of the State alone...the emphasis within health promotion has refocused on the roles that can be played by the individual and by agencies other than the State, such as work organisations and the community. (Kerr et al., 1996: xi, emphasis added)

The intensification of preventative health strategies can be partly attributed to the specific rationality of neo-liberal societies (Castel, 1991) which emphasises the centrality of the entrepreneurial individual who cares for him- or herself. Turner (1997: xix) terms this ‘a doctrine of obligation’, whilst Rose (1993: 3) argues that a neo-liberal form of governance, ‘embraces the ways in which one might be urged and educated to bridle one’s own passions, to control one’s own instincts, to govern oneself’ (ibid.). Increasingly, the self-management of risk is now implicated in the economic rationales of private companies (Petersen, 1997) as there is an, ‘offloading’ of responsibility from state to private individuals and other formal and informal structures including work organisations (Jackson and Carter, 1998). In so doing, the social contract between individuals, employers and the state has changed as, ‘governments are shifting the financial responsibility for absenteeism and disability to employers and employees’ (Grundemann and van Vuuren, 1997: 136). At the same time, health promotion discourses inhabit organisational environments to the extent that some workplaces now occupy the role of quasi-medical settings, with particular responsibilities for functions outside of their primary business.

Under health promotion logic, workplaces are now recognised as places that can be ‘good’ for, rather than deleterious to, your health and well-being. Whereas discourses of occupational health and safety concentrate their efforts on ensuring that work is not inherently ‘bad’ for you (Conrad and Walsh, 1992), ‘healthy workplace’ (Chu et al., 2000) logic encourages organisations to introduce measures to improve employee health. The growing prominence of wellness initiatives within private enterprises further reinforces the presence of such a shift (Connell and Grainger, 2002; Haynes, Dunnagan, and Smith, 1999; Wicken, 2000).

The identification of work organisations as guardians of health has been consolidated by public health policy discourses. Health promotion agencies now lobby central government to offer tax breaks to organisations investing in wellness services and facilities. Other forms of political rhetoric, institutional practice (Nettleton, 1997: 213), and academic discourse also strengthen the perception that employers have responsibilities for providing suitable, ‘healthy’ work environments. For example, Ashton (1989) has called for a ‘Corporate NHS’; one that focuses on the prevention of disease and promotion of health in the workplace as both medically desirable and commercially sensible. Furthermore, Chu et al. (2000: 156) suggest that, by establishing health-conscious environments inside and outside workplaces, ‘workers, their families and the workplace itself should benefit…the health-promoting

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workplace can bring about positive changes which support the overall success of an organisation’. Organisations registered to the growing number of health at work initiatives (e.g.

Scotland’s Health at Work award scheme) are charged with the responsibility for (and monitored on) the dissemination of health and wellness information to their employees. Set within clear codes laid out in medicalised health promotion ‘texts’, organisations are urged to provide suitable contexts within which employees can interrogate their lifestyles, establishing ‘that which should be aspired to’ (Coveney, 1998: 466). Practices to achieve this state of wellness work from the ‘narrowly defined’ codes prescribed by health promotion discourses (as laid out in health at work initiatives) and are reinforced in the organisational realm (or clinic).

The argument here is not, however, that the emergence of the health-promoting workplace represents a distinct rupture with earlier attempts at ‘wellness’. In fact, as early as the 1920s, industrial health programmes were evident in large corporations, institutionalising a corporate medical presence in the workplace (Griffiths, 1996a). However, there does appear to be an amplification or intensification of health concerns bound up in the growth of organisational wellness initiatives. Although the extent of activity continues to vary according to industrial sector and size (Docherty et al., 1999), some organisations now resemble surrogate surgeries, staffed by medical professionals whose role it is to educate the workforce of the risks inherent in making so-called ‘inappropriate’ lifestyle choices. As those of working age (and able to secure work) spend a significant proportion of their lives in the working environment, the workplace is seen to represent a convenient, efficient and effective access point to the individual, one that can play a significant role in shaping employee lifestyle behaviour (Kerr et al., 1996). In their association with scientific and medical knowledge, discourses of organisational wellness are increasingly legitimated (Foucault, 1980). This legitimacy is further enhanced by the supposed economic benefits accruable from an engagement with wellness.

These benefits include reductions in absenteeism rates, improved morale and efficiency, reduced insurance costs, improved working conditions and enhanced market positioning (Griffiths, 1996b).

In seeking to understand further the way in which discourses of organisational wellness come to permeate both the political and institutional (i.e. organisational) realms, it is necessary to return to the Foucauldian analytical framework delineated at the outset; governmentality and the subject (Foucault, 1979). In refining his earlier disciplinary society focus (Moss, 1998) and responding to criticism about his lack of concentration on the global operation of power, Foucault sought to address the ‘specificity of contemporary neoliberal forms of governance premised on the active consent and subjugation of subjects, rather than their oppression, domination or external control’ (Clegg et al., 2002: 317). Governmentality provides a way of thinking about a particular mentality of government (du Gay, 2000: 168) which represents ‘a subtle, comprehensive management of life drawing both from a top-down exercise of power over conduct…with a subjectivity constituted in a sense of personal responsibilities, rights, freedoms and dependencies’ (Fox, 1993: 32). Foucault coined the neologism governmentality to combine the ability of government to direct conduct and ‘the presumption that ‘everything’ can, should, must be managed, administered, regulated by authority’ (Allen, 1998: 179).

Within these arts of government, Jackson and Carter (1998) include not only the state, but also ‘other formal and informal structures’ such as work organisations and others with a vested interest in retaining the status quo. In analysing the contemporary label of organisational wellness, a range of governmental, health promotion and business agencies provide employers with direction. Discourses of health promotion, focused on both societal regulation (i.e. alleviating major health risks) and self-surveillance (i.e. individual responsibility for health maintenance) represent the perfect bedfellow for employers concerned with minimising the

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burden of employee healthcare costs. Institutionalised in the form of organisational wellness initiatives, this health promotional logic appears to provide medicalised legitimacy for the organisational governance of an employee’s subjectivity.

ORGANISATIONAL WELLNESS: VIRTUE OR VICE? At this point, it is worth considering the extent to which discourses of organisational wellness (as articulated in earlier discussions) simply act to colonise the subjective dimension of labour to maximise productivity or whether there is space for a reflexive otherness within this discursive realm. Certainly, medicalised and institutionalised discourses of organisational wellness seem to herald a narrowing of the range of legitimate ways in which the working body is performed and maintained, both within and outside of work.

In some organisational wellness initiatives, the promotion of health and fitness extends to include employee referral to the organisation’s in-house fitness centre for weight management advice or aerobic exercise (Holliday and Thompson, 2001). Here, the working body is essentially being ‘moulded and directed, disciplined, punished or rewarded to meet the demands of the rigours of work’ (Hancock and Tyler, 2000: 85).

Participation in active recreational discourses (mainly in the form of health and fitness) also demonstrates a level of ‘disciplinary self improvement’ (Petersen, 1997: 198), which carries a value in the competitive world of work. As Trethewey (1999) suggests, the professional body is also a fit body, indicating that the individual is self-motivated, responsible, willing and able to work. This is important, given that a worker’s body image and embodied labour power are increasingly significant components of organisational life (Hancock and Tyler, 2000; Trethewey, 1999). The working body is now assumed to be a material signifier, not only of the organisation’s relation with their own business (i.e. aesthetic labour), but also of employees’ employment opportunities. Bodies can be seen as texts to be read, communicating something about discipline, commitment and as a carrier of values concomitant with the ethos of the organisation with which they are employed (Hancock and Tyler, 2000: 93).

Given the above, it is unsurprising that health and fitness provision is a key component of those organisational wellness initiatives concerned with the maintenance, upkeep and improvement of the working body. In fact, some organisations now provide the material resources (e.g. gyms) where the working body can be fine-tuned. These corporeal garages represent an investment in the machinery of body maintenance where the body can be worked. For many, this organisational interest in employee health and fitness is unwelcome.

Leichter (1997: 361) decries the wellness movement as inherently discriminatory, elitist and exclusive, especially if employment opportunities might be restricted on the basis of ‘lifestyle incorrectness’ as defined by health promotion ‘experts’. Some occupations are already required by law to have certain basic levels of ‘wellness’ in order to carry out their duties (e.g. firemen, police, medical professions, armed forces and divers), but the more interesting trend is towards the importance of wellness for generalised recruitment and selection, retention and productivity decisions. These factors extend the concern with wellness outside of the formal confines of the workplace: The line between work and private life…extends companies’ interests in employees ‘health habits’ and ‘lifestyle’ without the old regard for whether they occur at work, at home, or indeed, whether they affect work performance in any direct way (Conrad and Walsh, 1992: 99).

There is some evidence to suggest that organisational wellness initiatives already blur the boundaries of an individual’s ‘private’ realm as work on their jobs and on their bodies are ‘collapsed into one continuous cycle of self-discipline’ (Holliday and Thompson, 2001: 125).

For example, outside formal organisational boundaries, wellness initiatives are increasingly

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used to distribute information and advice for employees to disseminate to friends and relatives (McGillivray, 2003). Here, the organisation extends its jurisdiction into the nonwork arena, given legitimacy by an engagement with (medicalised) discourses of organisational wellness. The extension of this surveillance effect is, however, deeply ambiguous, for although its purpose is to protect and enhance life chances, its ability to track and intervene in private lives is more troublesome (Lyon, 2002). Although changes in organisational forms might well have produced more porous organisational boundaries, flexible work practices and the ‘liberation of the individual from a forced and needless identity with the organisation itself’ (Dale, 2001: 150), paradoxically, the organisational remit might also be widened, especially if a rationality of work infuses ever more areas of social life (Deetz, 1998).

In this regard, the intensification of discourses of wellness seems to indicate the presence of an increasingly omnipresent gaze over the conduct of individuals’ lives (Chu et al., 2000; Duncan and Cribb, 1996; Hughes, 2000; Leichter, 1997) as, ‘one is always in…constant monitoring of health and never-ending risk management’ (Rose, 1999: 235). Whereas work and non-work were differentiated during industrialisation, the extension of organisational wellness practices might go some way to crumble these distinctions (Holliday and Thompson, 2001; Roberts, 1999). However, despite these concerns, it is now necessary to bring the paper toward a conclusion by subjecting to scrutiny the question of whether discourses of wellness merely produce docile bodies (Foucault, 1977) incapable of reflexivity or whether an active ‘Other’ of wellness can emerge.

THEORISING THE RESISTANT OTHER(S) OF WELLNESS Although business leaders and health promotion experts stress the performative and transformative role played by discourses of organisational wellness in constituting healthy working bodies, this does not necessarily result in the ‘reality’ of healthy bodies or healthy organisations for all. In fact, there is evidence available to suggest that the employee reception of organisational wellness initiatives is not wholly docile and passive. Instead, contestation, conflict and resistance to the rhetoric of wellness are evident. The assertion made here is that employees exhibit a number of responses (or micro strategies) to wellness messages that undermine the very foundations upon which these initiatives are built.

In discussions of governmentality and the subject, Foucault himself (Foucault, 1980) and those who interpret his work (Miller and Rose, 1990; Nettleton, 1997; Townley, 1994) reject the view that the exercise of power constitutes the subject as a mere product of a regime of domination. Rather, they argue that ‘contestation and conflict’ (du Gay, 2000: 181) are ever present within the power field as ‘resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power’ (Foucault, 1978: 95). In the context of this discussion, it is argued that that by focusing on subordinates’ strategic agency, knowledgeability and coping strategies, active subjects (Kendall and Wickham, 1999) might contest organisational attempts to mobilise the inactive working body. This is not to suggest that normalising discourses have no influence on behaviour, but, instead, to propose that the claims of competing discourses can constitute subjectivity differently (see Pringle, 2001). Moreover, it allows for the possibility of a variety of employee responses to ‘external discourses and strategies that attempt to discipline them’ (Lupton, 1997: 103).

Foucault’s (1986) conceptualisation of the project of the self provides a basis for illustrating more active processes of subjectivity at work. In the organisation studies field, Grey (1994) has drawn upon this strand of Foucault’s work to argue that, rather than perceiving employees simply as docile bodies produced by disciplinary regimes, some employees bring a project of the self, fostered elsewhere, with them to their work environments. These employees then

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utilise work experiences to maximise their self projects. This idea fits well with the experiences recorded in some studies of organisational wellness, especially those where health and fitness participation has been considered (Foley, Maxwell, and McGillivray, 2000; McGillivray, 2002; Shephard, 1996). For some employees, the provision of health and fitness facilities at work is viewed positively and given value because these individuals would have been mobilising their bodies elsewhere anyway (e.g. at their local gym). They are already convinced of the merits of a healthy lifestyle and have no objection to working on their bodies in the work environment. However, to date the empirical evidence suggests that this response is unlikely to be shared by the majority of the workforce (Fielding, 1990; Griffiths, 1996a, 1996b; McGillivray, 2003). Instead, there is a spectrum of possible responses to the organisational promotion of wellness along the lines of those illustrated in Figure 1.

This spectrum incorporates Grey’s (1994) analysis of more active processes of docility as a realisation of the project of the self, whilst also making space for employees who resist (transient position) and, in some instances, reject discourses of organisational wellness outright (i.e. non-recognition). Given that several studies have identified differential participation patterns in organisational wellness initiatives influenced by age, lifecycle and family responsibilities (Fielding, 1990; Kerr et al., 1996; McGillivray, 2003; Shephard, 1996) it was necessary to incorporate a transient position between the polar perspectives.

The Apollonian and Dionysian distinctions are useful for illustrative purposes as they represent the two extremes within which employee lived experiences of wellness might be positioned. On one extreme (to the left of Figure 1) sit employees demonstrating Grey’s (1994) self-disciplined form of subjectivity, the Apollonian docile body which has fully assimilated discourses of wellness and practises a calculable, disciplined and ascetic lifestyle.

This position is reflective of regular users of organisational wellness facilities, those who accrue distinction from their adherence to health and fitness regimes. At the other end of the spectrum (to the right of Figure 1) sits the Dionysian body (of the non-user) expressing its resistance through indiscipline and passivity towards healthy lifestyle discourses. This is the ‘unproductive’ or ‘absent’ body that is most often subject to hierarchical surveillance and normalising judgement as the primary target of discourses of wellness.

By introducing the transient position it is possible to illustrate that employees are often torn between what is expected of them through the tenets of medicalised discourses of organisational wellness and the set of experiences they bring with them when entering the work realm. In this sense, subject positions are always in the making and do not remain static (Foucault, 1986). So, although discourses of wellness embody ‘powerful norms about what is good and bad: ‘healthy’ or ‘unhealthy’; acceptable or unacceptable; desirable or undesirable’ (Duncan and Cribb, 1996: 346) there is evidence to indicate that some employees interpret these messages in a way that is antithetical to intended organisational outcomes. Subjects are not necessarily permanently caught up in an (inescapable) web of wellness surveillance which FIGURE 1. Spectrum of self-governance. Source: author.

FIGURE 1.

Assimilate

Reject

Docile

Resist

Spectrum of self-governance. Source: author.

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constitutes them as docile bodies, but instead are constantly in dissonance, occupying transient positions along the spectrum according to their relative degree of assimilation or resistance (i.e. in process). They are always en-route, torn between the power of organisational rhetoric and the limitations of their own production of subjectivity. Although the road laid out before subjects (in organisational wellness programmes) might be seen as setting them on a uni-directional route towards prescribed notions of wellness, there are numerous slip roads that disrupt this linear progression as few, ‘people uniformly accept the pronouncements on health from other sources’ (Nettleton, 1997: 219).

Furthermore, although a growing number of organisations provide Apollonian spaces for body maintenance (Haynes et al., 1999), continuing low rates of employee participation in what remain essentially ‘voluntary’ wellness initiatives (Fielding, 1990; Glasgow et al., 1993; Grant and Brisbin, 1992; Griffiths, 1996a; Springett and Dugdill, 1995) intimates that working subjects remain ‘seduced by the hedonistic pleasures of consumerism’ (Fullager, 2002: 72). For Rose (1999) this can be explained by the clash between notions of the rational, socially productive and disciplined citizen and the allure of narcissistic consumer culture. In sum, although there is some evidence that a proportion of employees self-regulate their conduct and invest in their own bodies through health maintenance (e.g. regular exercise), it is questionable that the rhetoric of wellness is matched by the reality of fitter, happier and more productive employees across the labour force.

CONCLUSION Although the focus upon unruly bodies remains a force of continuity with the concerns of 19th century paternalistic industrialists, there has been a subsequent shift in emphasis from direct, openly paternalistic and collective forms of organisational intervention towards more subtle techniques which target the health status of the working body. Instead of the designated Fordist inspectors visiting the homes of workers to monitor compliance with puritanical discourses, contemporary medicalised notions of organisational wellness appear to constitute each worker as his or her own inspector. Within this discursive wellness realm, working bodies are urged and supported to govern their own productive capacities, both in and outside of work. Active recreational discourses fit well with the emphasis upon health risk modification implied by discourses of organisational wellness. In fact, some organisational wellness initiatives even extend this to include the provision of the machinery of body work where unruly working bodies are brought to heel.

Notwithstanding the above, the paper also sought to propose an alternative reading of the wellness phenomenon, drawing on Foucault’s ideas of governmentality and the subject. To this end, it was proposed that discourses of organisational wellness cannot simply be seen as performative, but instead always contain imperfect governance arrangements. Ever-present conflict, contestation and resistance then prevent the translation of macro wellness messages into concrete effects at the local, organisational level. Instead, a heterogeneity of employee responses to wellness messages are possible, ranging from employees who utilise wellness facilities to realise their own projects of the self, to those who fail to recognise the value of discourses of wellness in their entirety. In developing a spectrum of self-governance, the various subject positions developed through discourses of wellness were identified and given a voice. Each demonstrates the imperfections of discourses of organisational wellness in constituting healthy working bodies that are fitter, happier and more productive.

Finally, this paper has not sought to suggest that organisational wellness initiatives are benign and detached from organisational productivity concerns. Rather, an attempt has been made to provide a less polarised argument—one that accepts that wellness initiatives are

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there for a particular reason (e.g. to enhance productivity), but also one that rejects the view that all employees are passive receivers of wellness wisdom.

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