The demise of repetitive strain injury in sceptical governing rationalities of workplace managers

Abstract

In the mid-1990s, RSI (repetitive strain injury) loomed as an occupational health epidemic in industrialised countries. A decade later, the problem appears to have faded away, but there has been little explanation for how this problem might have diminished. This paper offers an explanation for the decline of RSI in the social relations of workplaces, in the pragmatic, day-to-day governance of occupational health by workplace managers. Using the conceptual lens of governmentality theory, this study examined how workplace managers conceptualised, rationalised and responded to RSI in their work organisations. Open-ended interviews were conducted with 35 managers at four Ontario newspaper workplaces. This paper describes managers as guided by a discourse of scepticism about the legitimacy of RSI complaints. This discourse was 'practised' in different ways at each newspaper in varied RSI-management strategies, but each strategy privileged ideas about RSI being problematic in certain types of workers rather than in types of physical work environments. This conceptualisation of RSI splintered, subordinated and collapsed the problem within a broad human resources framework. This paper suggests that the 'taming' of RSI might have occurred in the context of micro-political, workplace-level shifts in the conceptualisation and management of RSI as an occupational health problem.

The Embodied Liminalities of Occupational Overuse Syndrome

“…Although connoting negative social capital, ACC income compensation is still more positive than are welfare benefits because it allows worker identities to be maintained. The negative capital associated with chronic injuries that are difficult to rehabilitate also isolates workers within the workplace, as MacEachen (2005) found in her study of Canadian newspapers. This negative capital is a key characteristic of the liminal habitus of OOS.…”

“…The other treatment of OOS examines the social construction of OOS within several arenas, often within an explicitly Foucauldian framework. These include the role medicine plays in legitimating OOS through diagnosis and the moral discourses implicit within the clinical encounter (Arksey 1994; Arksey and Sloper 1999; Jaye and Fitzgerald 2011; Reid and Reynolds 1990); the uneven gendered distribution of OOS among workers (Meekosha and Jakubowicz 1986; Reid and Reynolds 1990); the disciplinary technologies exercised within the workplace (MacEachen 2000, 2005); and also exercised through insurance agencies such as the ACC and rehabilitation agencies (Jaye and Fitzgerald 2010a).…”

The lived political economy of occupational overuse syndrome among New Zealand workers

“…The rising political dominance of neo‐liberal rationality has been implicated in the privileging of medical, legal, and occupational discourses of individualism over collectivist and welfarist discourses (Canaan 1999, MacEachen 2000, 2005, Reid and Reynolds 1990, Skillen 1996, Watterson 1999, Willis 1986, 1994).…”

The ‘actualities’ of knowledge work: an institutional ethnography of multi‐disciplinary primary health care teams

“…This study uses institutional ethnography (IE), an approach to sociological inquiry that investigates the co‐ordination through texts of people's work as embedded within institutional orders (Smith 2005). IE has recently attracted health researchers because of its particular emphasis on exploring system‐level co‐ordination of people's everyday work experiences (Fisher 2006, MacEachen 2004, Mykhalovskiy 2001, Rankin 2001).…”