Creating a market in workplace health promotion: the performative role of public health sciences and technologies

Abstract

The last 20 years have seen the rise of ‘a market’ aiming to promote the vitality and health of employees. In this article, we use insights from Science and Technology Studies to analyze how this market developed, what side effects it has given rise to, and to what extent the market identifies and addresses these side effects. Drawing on an analysis of documents and interviews with stakeholders, we will show that knowledge institutes have played a major role in turning employee health into a commodity. Referring to the health sciences for legitimation, they have developed ‘market devices’ that turn employee health into a commodity. In this commodification process, employees are transformed into an object of care and do not constitute a market party themselves. Privatization of occupational health is accounted for by arguing that market mechanisms will adequately address the health of employees as a public goal. However, subtle mechanisms serve to discipline employees who already display a more or less rationalized lifestyle into vital and fit workers, while threatening to exclude unhealthy employees. These unintended side effects of the market of workplace health promotion are neither identified nor addressed in the market, which – for the time being at least – is thus failing to safeguard the public interest of employee health.

Keywords:

• workplace health promotion
• commodification
• STS
• market devices
• knowledge institutes

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the interviewees for their cooperation, Yvette Bartholomée for her contribution to the project, and the other members of the WRR team and the reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.