Abstract
This thesis aims to go beyond the naturalization and cliquishness which actually exist about health and healthy lifestyle.
The way of presenting the problem in this dissertation takes its starting point in a firm, which, to encourage health activities and prevention, has introduced a health scheme for the employees. This is described as a staff boon, but health schemes are not only a neutral tool to improve health but must also be regarded as a control technology with its own agenda, laying down guidelines for the way the subject is constituted. Guidelines for “living” a healthy life style, and what possibilities and limitations these guidelines will involve for managers and employees respectively. In the light of exercise as an physical activities as an essential part of the health schemes the reduction of taking physical activities into useful specific input has put focus on the kind of athletics where you ignore essential factors as for example context, position of power, forms of participation, identity, experiences and feelings.
This fact will contribute to individualizing the issue of health and will also have an effect on each person’s experiences and feeling about his/her own body and the self.
The theoretical starting point of this thesis is constructional theories which make a complexity of sensitive thought possible, and the constructing function of interaction. Essential for the chosen theories is an investigating ambition to birth of processes as a central contribution to the scientific methodology.
In practice the dissertation will take its starting point in writers like Søndergaard, Staunæs, Kofoed, Davies, Simonsen, Khawaja and Foucault, as well as Järvinen and Mik-Meyer. Likewise also phenomenological theory, starting especially from Merleau-Ponty, will be involved to supplement with the subject’s experience of itself end the importance of the body for the experience.
Taking the agenda of this thesis as a starting point to investigate the human being as constructed or selfcreating and having its own responsibility to create a healthy life style Iram Khawaja’s integrative model forms the guidelines how discourse, position and narrative can be understood as key concepts of the understanding of the selfconstructing human being. The model can be used to understand the idea of human being’s selfconstruction and a tool to investigate this construction.
The data of empiricism consist of two observations and four qualitative interviews and this empiricism-borne analysis is the centre of the dissertation, but the analysis is metatheoretically and methodologically informed.
In the dissertation it is investigated how health schemes can be considered as part of the superior health discourse which is prevalent in society, and at the same time the health schemes are also linked to the way the firm is run.
Intersectionality has been used to investigate how cathegories like “the good employee” and “the healthy employee” intersect with each other. It is explored how health schemes as control technology centre on the subject controlling itself and thereby submitting to the current discourse to be acknowledged as a worthy member of the organization. Thereby the concept of power is also involved, and focus is on the importance of this in connection with inclusion and exclusion.
The phenomenological theory being the starting point it is illustrated how the body is not just an object but is also subject. In this way the experience the interviewed persons point out as important according to life style and life option also gets a bodily dimension. It is explored how reduction of the body can also be regarded as a reduction of “the self”.
The way of presenting the problem in this dissertation takes its starting point in a firm, which, to encourage health activities and prevention, has introduced a health scheme for the employees. This is described as a staff boon, but health schemes are not only a neutral tool to improve health but must also be regarded as a control technology with its own agenda, laying down guidelines for the way the subject is constituted. Guidelines for “living” a healthy life style, and what possibilities and limitations these guidelines will involve for managers and employees respectively. In the light of exercise as an physical activities as an essential part of the health schemes the reduction of taking physical activities into useful specific input has put focus on the kind of athletics where you ignore essential factors as for example context, position of power, forms of participation, identity, experiences and feelings.
This fact will contribute to individualizing the issue of health and will also have an effect on each person’s experiences and feeling about his/her own body and the self.
The theoretical starting point of this thesis is constructional theories which make a complexity of sensitive thought possible, and the constructing function of interaction. Essential for the chosen theories is an investigating ambition to birth of processes as a central contribution to the scientific methodology.
In practice the dissertation will take its starting point in writers like Søndergaard, Staunæs, Kofoed, Davies, Simonsen, Khawaja and Foucault, as well as Järvinen and Mik-Meyer. Likewise also phenomenological theory, starting especially from Merleau-Ponty, will be involved to supplement with the subject’s experience of itself end the importance of the body for the experience.
Taking the agenda of this thesis as a starting point to investigate the human being as constructed or selfcreating and having its own responsibility to create a healthy life style Iram Khawaja’s integrative model forms the guidelines how discourse, position and narrative can be understood as key concepts of the understanding of the selfconstructing human being. The model can be used to understand the idea of human being’s selfconstruction and a tool to investigate this construction.
The data of empiricism consist of two observations and four qualitative interviews and this empiricism-borne analysis is the centre of the dissertation, but the analysis is metatheoretically and methodologically informed.
In the dissertation it is investigated how health schemes can be considered as part of the superior health discourse which is prevalent in society, and at the same time the health schemes are also linked to the way the firm is run.
Intersectionality has been used to investigate how cathegories like “the good employee” and “the healthy employee” intersect with each other. It is explored how health schemes as control technology centre on the subject controlling itself and thereby submitting to the current discourse to be acknowledged as a worthy member of the organization. Thereby the concept of power is also involved, and focus is on the importance of this in connection with inclusion and exclusion.
The phenomenological theory being the starting point it is illustrated how the body is not just an object but is also subject. In this way the experience the interviewed persons point out as important according to life style and life option also gets a bodily dimension. It is explored how reduction of the body can also be regarded as a reduction of “the self”.
| Originalsprog | Dansk |
|---|---|
| Status | Udgivet - 2010 |
Emneord
- styringsteknologier
- sundhedsordninger
- sundhed
- krop
- fysioterapi