Back to balance: labour therapeutics and the depoliticisation of workplace distress

James Davies ()
Additional contact information
James Davies: University of Roehampton, London, UK

Palgrave Communications, 2016, vol. 2, issue 1, 1-9

Abstract: Abstract This article assesses the rise in diverse workplaces of what the author terms “labour therapeutics”—the application of therapeutic ideas and interventions to the understanding and management of employee distress. By way of an inductive narrative analysis of five institutional proponents of labour therapeutics, it concludes that the interventions and understandings labour therapeutics promote, by either individualizing employee distress or reducing it to the micro-arrangements of the workplace, inadvertently depoliticize the problem of work for growing numbers of individuals and organizations in the contemporary work setting. Further research is requested to explicate the confluence between neo-liberal working objectives and the new forms of labour therapeutic governance now in rapid ascent. This article is published as part of a collection entitled ‘On balance: lifestyle, mental health and wellbeing’.

Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1057/palcomms.2016.27 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:pal:palcom:v:2:y:2016:i:1:d:10.1057_palcomms.2016.27

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/palcomms/about

DOI: 10.1057/palcomms.2016.27

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Palgrave Communications from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().