ABSTRACT
In line with what was said in the previous chapter, the standard view of the health-management nexus is that individual health can be seen as the outcome of different management ideologies. The ‘concertive’ control strategy that is currently dominating management thinking and practice promises ‘positive health’ by unleashing human energy, commitment and engagement. However, as implied in Chapter 1 activities that explicitly aim to promote good health and well-being among employees can be understood as expressions of management in the sense of constituting particular loyalties, identities and subjectivities. In this sense, the pursuit of a ‘healthy lifestyle’ may not only be the result of a certain organizational environment and culture; but may in fact be a constituting feature of them. To this extent ‘health’ is a key mechanism of organized human behavior, i.e. management, where health promotion activities are the concrete practices through which a certain management ideology can be realized; specifically that of creating an active, self-managing and self-regulating individual who controls all aspects of his or her life. In her book The Imperative of Health Lupton (1995: 70) noted that most
of the literature on health promotion begins by attempting to define ‘health.’ Typically, students of health promotion put forward the World Health Organization’s (WHO) definition of health as a state of complete physical, social and mental well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity (see WHO, 2010). Thus, according to standard definitions of health in the health promotion literature, ‘health’ denotes more than a medical condition, disease or lack thereof. Certainly according to this view, the official definitions and interpretations of ‘health’ rarely allow for individuals’ own definitions of health. “For example, according to the WHO definition, people who are permanently disabled are not healthy, even though they may require little medical care or ongoing treatment” (Lupton, 1995: 72). Addressing this issue, Blaxter (1990: 13-15) reported that some students of health promotion have argued that the only valid measure of ‘health’ is to accept people’s own assessment of whether they are healthy or not. Other researchers have claimed that the issue of what is ‘health’ must not be a topic for the lay person, but for the health promotion expert (see Parish, 1995).
