The urge to work: normative ordering in the narratives of people on long-term sick leave

Abstract

This study analyzes the narratives of people on long-term sick leave due to low back pain. We draw upon the theory of justification-as developed by the French sociologists Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot-to investigate how the informants' narratives evoke and rely upon three 'orders of worth'. These are the industrial order concerning being a productive citizen, the domestic order of home and family, and the civic order positioning the citizen in the regulations of the welfare state. In-depth interview interpretations map a strongly normative urge to work, a troubled home life when not working, ways of keeping in touch with work when absent and complex negotiations of the possibility of non-work. The different orders of worth do more than point towards their 'own' arena: Norms and values of the domestic order, in particular, point toward the need for return to work rather than towards life at home (nonwork). The interviews also demonstrate that the urge to work is not a strictly personal phenomenon, but tightly interwoven with problems and enjoyments in specific social arenas and interactions. We conclude that the narratives deal more with the trouble of sick leave than with the enjoyment of work. Hence, the urge to work is just as much a turn away from nonwork. Finally, we point out that return to work research should engage more broadly with research on unemployment, to avoid a work-emphasizing bias.

Work as an arena for health—Supervisors’ experiences with attending to employees’ sick leave and return-to-work process

“…In the present study, several supervisors described a reciprocal view of returnto-work in connection with highly skilled employees with long-term employment, or employees showing a high degree of work ethics. Other studies have highlighted how worth is connected to productivity in paid work [50], and maintaining a strong work ethic is important in contemporary welfare states due to the expenses represented by work absence-probably even more so in countries where legislation protects sick workers' income for as long as in Norway. Although the supervisors told of malingering workers as exceptions, most nevertheless seemed to consider them when describing their own dilemmas on facilitating presence.…”