Challenges in work, health and well-being. An interdisciplinary
approach
Lecture 1 Introduction to Challenges in work, health and well-being
Literature
Work as an Inclusive Part of Population Health Inequities Research and
Prevention. (Quinn et al., 2018)
Work analysis in health inequities is crucial as it provides a concrete social location where
fundamental causes of health status materialize. However, work is often excluded from health
inequities examinations, leading to fragmentation of thinking and resources, incomplete
understanding of inequitable patterns, and less effective strategies to intervene in them.
Factors contributing to this absence include work's complexity as a concept, its overlap with
socioeconomic position, race, ethnicity, and gender, the development of a parallel line of
inquiry into occupational health inequities, and the lack of precise data to explore the
relationships between work and health status.
Incorporating work in population health research could strengthen efforts to achieve health
equity by addressing work-related and non-work-related overlaps, monitoring trends, and
disentangling factors that influence health and health inequities.
Chapter 1: Generating inequalities (Tomaskovic-Devey & Avent-Holt, 2019)
Prior research has often overlooked the social spaces where income, respect, and rewards are
generated and distributed, such as organizations, firms, and workplaces.
Relational Inequality Theory (RIT) focuses on the organizational production of categorical
inequalities, in the context of the intersectional complexity and institutional fluidity that
characterize social life. Premises of RIT:
1. The causally most powerful locations in social life are proximate networks of social
relationships.
2. Often, if not almost always, within and between organizations the influential
relationships that generate and distribute resources emerge and a local social order
develops.
Organizations are the site of the social relations that generate distributional inequalities, so
they must create and obtain the resources to be distributed, so they are resource pooling
devices.
Through social relationships and tasks, as well as their relative power in market exchange,
organizations accumulate the resources that people within them then make claims on. These
claims operate through the social mechanisms of exploitation and social closure. Some are
more or less powerful in these claims due to cultural, status, and material advantages.
Critique to the status attainment, human capital, and heterodox economics/political economy
theories is that none capture the actual social relations and their organizational context that are
the direct causes of resource distribution.
Status attainment theory focuses on how characteristics of an individual’s family
background (also called socioeconomic origins) relate to his or her educational attainment and
,occupational status in society. The great strength of status attainment sociology has been to
explore the impact of families and schools on the development of individual capacities.
However, the status attainment approach takes for granted the employment structure of
opportunity and asks how people are allocated across that structure. Status attainment is an
approach to social inequality that highlights the sorting of individuals into national
occupational structures, but it ignores social relations within organizations.
In the human capital approach individuals are thought to act like small firms, investing in
their productive capacity, getting jobs based on those skill investments, and then getting paid
for their contributions to production. This is a reasonable account, except when people are not
paid for their skills or are over- or underpaid relative to their contributions. In practice, human
capital theorists often recognize that both product and labor market competition routinely fail
to produce fair income distributions but treat these as temporary anomalies rather than the
norm. Some labor economists have come to understand that firms reward human capital in
complex ways inconsistent with the model of a single labor market, that wages reflect not
only individual but also firm productivity, and that firms producing the same product have
wide variations in their productivity.
According to the conventional macroeconomics the real inequality problem is the standard
of living, and the primary solution is to raise the standard of living of everyone through
economic growth and higher productivity. The theory assumes a perfect competition in
product and labor markets, causing the relative power of labor and capital, of various types of
labor and of various organizational forms of firms to be assumed away.
Heterodox economists begin with the assumption that markets are imperfect and infused
with power imbalances. Thus, the relative bargaining power of various actors is an empirical
question and is generally assumed to be important, at least to some extent.
The theory of Picketty is that capital tends to get higher rates of return than labor on its
investment, so over time the natural outcome of capitalism is increased concentration of
wealth in the hands of the wealthy and their descendants.
Inequality must be understood through a relational lens.
Homo economicus, the imaginary actor in formal economic theory, is a rational, cognitively
powerful, utility maximizer. She is smart, calculative, and out for herself.
Homo sociologicus understands and navigates her world through culture and relationships.
She can be self-seeking, but she is also always other-regarding.
The crucial advantage of the Homo sociologicus understanding of behavior and institutions
over the Homo economicus model is that it more nearly resembles the real world created by
living, breathing, thinking people.
We focus on workplace inequalities because in contemporary societies most inequalities are
generated through the relationships in and around workplaces.
Work gets done not because the people have intentions but because they have relationships in
terms of the tasks to be accomplished.
, The basic argument of this book is that if we want to understand the generation of
inequalities, we need to focus on the relationships between people, positions, and
organizations, rather than individual essences or intentions.
The fundamental mechanisms for producing inequality are exploitation, social closure, and
claims-making.
Much contemporary inequality is produced via the monopolization of good jobs or the
ownership of monopolistic firms. Most of this is legitimated by selection procedures, training
decisions, and past pay practices.
Lecture 2: Does work make you sicker or healthier?
Literature
The sociology of emotional labor. (Wharton, 2009)
A fundamental concern is understanding how emotions are regulated by culture and social
structure and how emotional regulation affects individuals, groups, and organizations.
Emotional labor in The Managed Heart
Feeling rules are societal norms about the appropriate type and amount of feeling that should
be experienced in a particular situation.
Emotion management (or emotion work) refers to how people actively shape and direct
their feelings, and a recognition that social structure and institutions impose constraints on
these efforts. This is a reaction to the feeling rules. It is essentially a private act, influenced by
broad cultural and social norms about what is appropriate to feel and express, but not directly
regulated by other people or organizations.
Deep acting is an attempt to align privately felt emotions with normative expectations.
Surface acting is to bring the outward expression of emotion in line with normative
expectations.
Emotional labor is the process by which workers are expected to manage their feelings in
accordance with employer-defined rules and guidelines. In other words, it is “the management
of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display”. This is very important in
service jobs, such as nursing, and increasingly becomes a formal job requirement. Jobs
requiring emotional labor are much more likely to be performed by women than by men.
Performance of emotional labor threatens to produce emotive dissonance, which happens
when workers who are required to display emotions regardless of whether these are congruent
with their feelings may over time develop a sense of self-estrangement or distress. Those who
perform emotional labor are susceptible to a range of identity-related issues that impinge upon
their psychological well-being.
Emotional labor as interactive work
Jobs involving interaction with others are thought to require significant amounts of emotional
labor, but this labor is examined in relation to other aspects of work, particularly the dynamics
of power, status, and gender. These studies thus collectively demonstrate the distinctive
features of interactive work, while simultaneously linking these elements to broader work
structures and processes.
