Erika Björklund

Constituting the Healthy Employee?: Governing Gendered Subjects in Workplace Health Promotion Erika Björklund

Concern for worklife health is increasing as exemplified by the proliferation of workplace health promotion interventions on offer. Hence, parallel with research for the purpose of developing ?best practice? in health education and workplace health promotion, it is also useful, and perhaps prudent, to try to gain insight into how notions about health govern the targeted subjects and what the effects are on their sense of self. Drawing on Foucault?s notion of governmentality, this book examines the subjectification of employees to imperatives of health in workplace health promotion initiatives. After identifying two health discourses that were drawn on in these initiatives, the book investigates the limitations and imperatives that these discourses imposed on the participants. It also investigates how these limitations and imperatives were taken up and (re)contextualized, and what the consequences were for how participants were invited to govern and make sense of themselves as healthy (gendered) individuals. This book should be of use and interest to students, professionals and researchers in the field of public health and health education.