ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the first of the two most dominant metaphors of institution, namely the organization-as-machine. It considers some of the ways in which mechanistic constructions of organizational experience have a powerful, often taken-for-granted influence on our assumptions and understandings of health and well-being. Health scholars argue that such mechanistic, binary assumptions reveal the origins of the occupational and organizational health literature in the fields of preventative medicine, epidemiology and engineering, in which the emphasis is on preventing and repairing breakages and breakdowns. Traditionally, discourses of the machine have involved a strong intertwining of health, efficiency and hence compliance and conformity; in the future, however, such connections may well be loosened and potentially replaced with understandings of health which are more infused with notions of resistance and freedom.
