Taking Care of Business: Self-Help and Sleep Medicine in American Corporate Culture

Abstract

This article argues that corporate management in the United States has expanded its scope beyond office walls and encompasses many aspects of workers' daily lives. One new element of corporate training is the micromanagement of sleep; self-help books, newspaper reports, magazine articles, and consulting firms currently advise workers and supervisors on optimizing productivity by cultivating certain sleep habits. Although consultants and self-help books make specific recommendations about sleep, most medical research is inconclusive about sleep's benefits for human performance. Using the ideas of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze as a philosophical backdrop, this article examines the complex and often contradictory links between self-help, medicine, and corporate governance.

Medicalisation or customisation? Sleep, enterprise and enhancement in the 24/7 society

“…On the one hand it more or less readily fits, given the aforementioned role which various forms of sleep-related expertise play today in encouraging napping within the workplace, particularly when such practices are integrated into or tacked on to extant workplace health and safety polices and programmes (cf. Baxter & Kroll-Smith, 2005;Brown, 2004). On the other hand, once again, it clearly includes yet takes us beyond any such processes.…”

“…They also express expert led agendas, feeding sleep science into modern day work culture (Brown, 2004;Hancock et al, 2009), either as part and parcel of official health and safety programmes or in the service of other more general productivity and performance drives, thereby enhancing contemporary work ethics still further in the 24/7 society.…”

“…To the extent, moreover, that developments of this kind are also profitable in commercial terms, through consultancy firms, popular self-help books and the like, they also feed into the wider 'sleep industry' which is busy 'capitalising' on our sleep, quite literally, day and night (see for example Brown, 2004;MooAllem, 2007;Williams, 2005;Williams & Boden, 2004). Perhaps most importantly, as Baxter and Kroll-Smith (2005) remind us, however embryonic these trends and transformations may be, initiatives of this kind amount to a further blurring of the boundaries between home and work, public and private time, thereby turning short or 'ultra-short' sleep (qua napping) not simply into a 'productive act' but a 'regulated timespace behaviour' in this latest phase of so-called 'flexible' capitalism (Hancock et al, 2009).…”

“…The paper builds in new ways on both our own previous sociological work on the medicalisation and politics of sleep (Williams, 2011(Williams, , 2005Williams, Seale, Boden, Lowe, & Steinberg, 2008) and other recent research on medico-managerial agendas regarding sleep (Brown, 2004;Hancock, Williams, & Boden, 2009) and the changing fate and fortunes of practices like the workplace nap in a global context (Baxter & Kroll-Smith, 2005). Whilst important work has also recently been done on sleeping cultures in Asia and the West, both past and present (cf.…”

Care of the Self and American Physicians' Place in the "War on Terror": A Foucauldian Reading of Senator Bill Frist, M.D.

“…Although reference is made to discourse, the materiality of power over patients is central to these analyses. This structuralist reading is laid most bare in the parallels drawn between physician-corporate management and patient-worker obedience (Butchart, 1996;Brown, 2004;Zoller, 2003) and in the neoliberal concern for individuals' "rights" to competent and informed decision-making (Prado, 2003;Ellis, 2003).…”