Who cares for wellbeing? Corporate wellness, social reproduction and the essential worker

Abstract

This paper seeks to contribute to the rethinking of wellbeing in organisation studies. First, it contributes to critiques of corporate wellness by drawing on social reproduction theory to show how the wellbeing of every individual worker is dependent on the efforts of many, often unacknowledged, others. Corporate wellness initiatives epitomise the dominant, neoliberal narrative of wellbeing in which individuals are posited as responsible for the maintenance of their own wellbeing. Against this, social reproduction theory highlights the relational, socially distributed and materially grounded character of wellbeing. Second, the COVID-19 pandemic opened an opportunity to radically rethink wellbeing. A social reproduction reading of the category of the essential worker allows us to analyse some of the tensions and contradictions involved in the work of producing wellbeing today. It shows the unequal distribution of both the work involved and of its rewards. In sum, this paper helps extend debates over wellbeing in organisation studies beyond, on the one hand, individualised accounts of wellbeing and, on the other, accounts that ultimately confine understandings of wellbeing to the traditional workplace. It argues for the need for organisational studies of wellbeing to take the wider social reproduction of wellbeing as its starting point.

Social reproduction: Households, public policies, and alternative organizing

“…The study sheds light on the dual role of migrant workers both as providers of care and as receivers of support offered by a network of engaged community leaders and activists. Another recent study in this area draws on social reproduction theory to criticize corporate wellness initiatives for their individualistic stance, arguing that the wellbeing of every individual worker is dependent on the efforts of many unacknowledged workers whose wellbeing is often sacrificed for the wellbeing of others (Murtola & Vallelly, 2023).…”

“…While there has been renewed interest in social reproduction in the fields of feminist politics, education, and economic geography (Bowlby et al, 2023;Mezzadri, 2022;Murtola & Vallelly, 2023;Nassif, 2022), our call for papers for this special issue (SI), launched before the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, responded to a scarcity of research in management and organization journals directly addressing the interrelationship between productive and reproductive labor. As the articles submitted to this SI were under peer review, organizational journals began publishing more papers on social reproduction (e.g., Nassif, 2022;Zulfiqar, 2022aZulfiqar, , 2022b.…”

Re-organising wellbeing: Contexts, critiques and contestations of dominant wellbeing narratives

“…Delivery workers, supermarket workers, health and social care staff – disproportionately feminised, working class and from ethnic minorities – had to work through the pandemic, placing themselves and their families at increased risk for the safety of better paid, more privileged workers. No amount of clapping from the front step, or rhetorical valuing of these workers as ‘essential’ (Murtola and Vallelly, 2022 – this issue), compensated for the structurally disadvantaged position that these employees faced.…”