1,720,966 research outputs found
Evaluation of the ESF Local Service Board Development and Priority Delivery Project: Formative Report
No full textFrom stress to resistance: Challenging the capitalist underpinnings of mental unhealth in work and organizations
Full text linkThe worldwide spread of work-related mental unhealth suggests that this is a major problem affecting organizations and employees on a global scale. In this paper, we therefore provide a thematic review of the literatures that address this issue in management and organization studies (MOS) and related fields. While these literatures examine how employee mental health is affected by organizational and occupational structures and managed by organizations and employees, they have paid relatively little attention to the capitalist labour relations which underpin the unhealthy conditions of contemporary working life. They have paid even less attention to how these conditions may be resisted. To help future scholarship in MOS challenge this state of affairs, we draw on some of the most basic but central notions of exploitation, alienation and resistance in classic and current critiques of capitalism, optimistic that this may help strengthen the field's capacity to confront mental unhealth in settings of work and organization
Working against the backdrop of extreme marginalisation: stigma and the social relational model for the setting of mental health conditions
Full text linkThis paper investigates how employees with mental health conditions (MHCs) experience and respond to working in the contemporary UK workplace. Employing the Social Relational Model (SRM) of disability, the paper positions stigma as an organising structural force that actively produces Social and Relational disabling barriers – impairment effects, barriers to doing, and barriers to being – that shape the working lives of employees with MHCs. Qualitative data from 42 interviewees working for varied employers – including small, medium and large enterprises, public and private sector – reveals how workplace processes and practices assume norms of the ‘ideal worker’, a worker characterised by uninterrupted productivity and emotional stability. We explore how these norms contribute to the stigmatisation of workers managing MHCs and how consequently these workers avoid workplace stigmatisation. By explicitly linking understandings of structural stigma to the SRM, we advance understanding of how stigma operates in often indirect and subtle ways to disable employees with MHCs. Conclusions with implications for HRM include the need to confront normative ideals and institutional practices that sustain stigma by advocating for practices that dismantle stigma, challenge ableist constructs, support diverse mental health experiences and, focus on creating ideal workplaces, rather than continuing to valorise the ideal worker
Invisible minds: The dominant wellbeing discourse, mental health, bio-power and chameleon resistance
Full text linkThe dominant wellbeing discourse (DWD) in neoliberal economies can be understood as a form of bio-power that presupposes healthy individuals. It seeks to produce subjects who take responsibility for their wellbeing and, in this way, render themselves productive. Drawing on interviews with individuals who volunteered a diagnosed mental health condition (MHC), we explore how they resisted the negative associations with MHCs through making their conditions invisible. Hence they sought to blend in and make themselves visible as ‘normal’, well, healthy, responsible, productive subjects. Although we call this chameleon resistance it is bound up with consent and compliance as it reproduces the DWD and negative associations with MHCs
Foucauldian power and resistance
Full text linkThis entry examines a Foucauldian conceptualization of power and resistance within the context of digital mental health innovation. From a Foucauldian perspective, innovation is necessarily intertwined with power insofar as it necessitates both management and employees negotiating the meaning of change. The innovation discussed here involved the creation of a new digital mental health management tool. This innovation emerged out of grassroots-level interactions within a social enterprise that employs individuals with mental health conditions (MHCs). In Foucauldian terms, this means that individuals with MHCs are empowered to create their own training, rather than managers or health professionals imposing this upon them, which in turn, expresses resistance against longstanding mental health stigmatization
Learning to manage a mental health condition: Caring for the self and ‘normalizing’ identity at work
Full text linkThis article examines the internal and external pressures to ‘normalize’ identity in relation to individuals experiencing mental health conditions (MHCs) at work. The data takes the form of three vignettes extracted from a larger empirical study of 60 interviews. These explore the tensions surrounding identity for individuals experiencing MHCs as well as their interventions to suppress exhibiting the condition. The analysis captures a number of competing meanings surrounding identity in relation to learning to care for the self and managing MHCs. Our contribution is to explore the relationships between learning to care for the self and the performativity of ‘normalizing’ identity in managing MHCs at work. It also provides a potential means of integrating Foucault’s ethics of caring for the self with the literature on identity in ways that can be illuminating for those who manage their MHCs and the demands of work through processes of ‘normalization’. This analysis offers theoretical insights regarding how identity work may be self-defeating in exacerbating MHCs and therefore is of some practical benefit for managers, health professionals and those experiencing MHCs since they often leave individuals with little choice but to intensify their attempts to ‘normalize’ their identities
The ‘sellable semblance’ : Employability in the context of mental-illness
Full text linkEmbedded within the concept of employability is the constant demand to become more ‘employable’ and to live up to an ideal ‘sellable self’, with no ‘faults’, ‘weaknesses’ or ‘limitations’. In order to maintain employability and stay in employment, individuals may be constrained to conceal information that does not correspond to this sellable self. Examining the costs of living up to the ‘semblance’ of the sellable self is particularly important in relation to mental health; this is even more so in light of the paucity of critical studies in this context. This paper examines issues of mental health and employability as they are reflected upon through the experiences of people with mental health conditions. Looking at the employment experiences of these individuals offers the potential to illuminate the struggles of all, or most of us, in our endeavours to secure employment and retain employability
- …
