ABSTRACT
One of the principal features of health promotion as a field of practice and enquiry is that is very difficult to pin down for descriptive purposes. ‘What health promotion is’ the subject of fierce and incessant disputes among professional practitioners and policy makers, and it must be said that the battles are waged for the most part on decidely ill-formed theoretical grounds. It has long seemed to me in itself highly significant, and in itself a matter deserving social enquiry, that the large and growing enterprise of health promotion in Britain is so centrally torn apart by disagreements about its basic purposes and methods, and yet that these disagreements have received so little systematic clarification or fundamental review in the light of social theory. A major aim of this chapter, therefore, is to offer a conceptual framework for deliberation on different forms of contemporary health promotion, and to use this framework:
1. to illustrate the tensions and conflicts that mark the development of policy and practice in this field;
2. to highlight some of the points at which debates around healthpromotion policy and practice may benefit from re-thinking within the wider terms of reference of social theory;
3. to indicate some directions in which future social enquiry in health promotion could usefully proceed.
