‘Best in class’ – Healthy employees, athletic executives and functionally disabled jobseekers

Christian Maravelias

Scandinavian Journal of Management, 2015, vol. 31, issue 2, 279-287

Abstract: This paper accounts for health initiatives for employees, competitive sports initiatives for corporate executives, and workability initiatives for functionally disabled individuals. On this basis the paper suggests that health, athletic competitiveness and functional disability have become central markers of employability associated with three bio-politically defined classes. A middle class of individuals that work on their lifestyles and selves to match health and employability ideals; an elite class of individuals that take part in sports activities to prove their ‘true’ competitive nature; finally, an underclass of individuals that identify with their functional disabilities and make use of them opportunistically as resources for getting employment. The paper furthermore suggests that all three initiatives are expressions of a neoliberal governmentality that cancel out the liberal distinction between an economic world of work and a private and social world by inciting individuals to use their lives in full as human capital.

Keywords: Health; Employability; Neoliberal governmentality; Post-disciplinary regulation; Human capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095652211400133X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:scaman:v:31:y:2015:i:2:p:279-287

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/872/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... me/872/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.scaman.2014.11.005

Access Statistics for this article

Scandinavian Journal of Management is currently edited by Janne Tienari

More articles in Scandinavian Journal of Management from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().