Salvation through health: What the history of work tells us about the 2020 health crisis
Gomez, Pierre-Yves
Salvation through health: What the history of work tells us about the 2020 health crisis - 2021.
33
COVID-19 reveals the specific religiosity of our Western society, which is based on the belief in the omnipotence of a managerial technostructure capable of controlling the diseases that threaten us. Taking the history of occupational health and its pathologization as an example, this article shows how managerial rationality in companies derives its legitimacy and power from its capacity 1) to define what an occupational disease is, and 2) to master the tools that allow workers to protect themselves from it. The confidence of the population in expert managers is only acquired insofar as they assure them that they are working for their health in an environment that these same experts describe as potentially increasingly pathogenic. This dialectic explains the massive subjection of populations to managers’ discourse during the health crisis of 2020. But it contains the seeds of risks as to the sustainability of such beliefs.
Salvation through health: What the history of work tells us about the 2020 health crisis - 2021.
33
COVID-19 reveals the specific religiosity of our Western society, which is based on the belief in the omnipotence of a managerial technostructure capable of controlling the diseases that threaten us. Taking the history of occupational health and its pathologization as an example, this article shows how managerial rationality in companies derives its legitimacy and power from its capacity 1) to define what an occupational disease is, and 2) to master the tools that allow workers to protect themselves from it. The confidence of the population in expert managers is only acquired insofar as they assure them that they are working for their health in an environment that these same experts describe as potentially increasingly pathogenic. This dialectic explains the massive subjection of populations to managers’ discourse during the health crisis of 2020. But it contains the seeds of risks as to the sustainability of such beliefs.
Réseaux sociaux