Programme full

Alienation and Wellbeing in the Workplace
Yuill, C.
(Robert Gordon University)
Thursday 16 April 2015 11:00 - 12:30
PAPER SESSION 4
Drawing on interviews with social workers this research seeks to (1) explore how Marxian alienation theory can
explain and explore the dynamics of health and wellbeing in the workplace and (2) how regressive changes in publicsector
work have impacted on the wellbeing of workers.
As a theoretical resource alienation theory has been underutilised within medical sociology. In some respects this
situation is surprising given alienation theory's potential to articulate the relations between subjective experiences and
objective circumstances, and to draw attention to how personal distress emerges out of relations with underlying
social structures that can ultimately impact on the embodied self of workers resulting in poor wellbeing. The
presentation therefore opens with an explication and defence of alienation theory and its use in the context of health
and wellbeing.
The presentation then moves to presenting the headline findings from the research to add empirical examples to both
illustrate how the theory can be applied in a research context and to highlight some of the main findings, such as how
contemporary neoliberal capitalism has introduced a variety of changes to the public sector which have led to a
deprofessionalization of social work resulting in a negative impact on the health and wellbeing of social workers in a
number of ways.
‘The Dentist Will See You Now’: Dental Health and the Politics of Abjection in ‘The Dentists’ (ITV 2014)
Neville, P.
(University of Bristol)
On the 16 June 2014 ITV broadcasted a one hour documentary programme entitled 'The Dentists'. This TV
documentary, filmed over a number of weeks in University Dental Hospital Manchester, was lauded as the first of its
kind in UK health –related reality TV to address the issue of dental health. As Dr Mike Pemberton, Clinical Head of
Division at University Dental Hospital Manchester outlined, the documentary aimed to 'highlight the varied nature of
dentistry we undertake and [this] will help the public to understand our work better'. However, despite these lofty aims,
TV reviewers were quick to point out the gruesomeness of the documentary with its graphic images of tooth
extractions and distressed children. The spectacular way in which the filmmakers addressed the issue of dental decay
raises doubt over the social or educational value of the documentary. This paper would like to explore further the
representation of dental health as presented in 'The Dentists'. It questions the graphic images of dental surgeries and
its selection and representation of its TV subjects. Such an analysis will reveal the existence of a larger agenda of the
filmmakers to promote notions of dental decay and neglect as a class issue. Overall, this paper will contend that 'The
Dentists' is a further indication of how health-related reality TV documentaries spectacularise health and shame the
'unhealthy' working –class citizen.
Glasgow’s ‘Excess Mortality’: A Cautionary Tale of a ‘Society in Transition’ in the Era of ‘Progress’
Collins, C., Levitt, I.
(University of the West of Scotland)
This paper reports on work undertaken to account for the troubling divergence in mortality between the cities of
Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester since the early 1970s. It provides a 'cautionary tale' of a 'society in transition' in
an era of what might now be seen as 'optimism' and 'progress'. Drawing on new archival research, it is argued that the
far-reaching plans to 'modernise' the Scottish economy which emerged from the mid-late 1950s, and which were
crystallized in the 1963 White Paper, Central Scotland: A Programme for Development and Growth, had profoundly
deleterious effects on the City of Glasgow – effects which were appreciated by policy makers from the mid-1960s, and
were understood by the early 1970s to be on a dramatic scale with potentially calamitous consequences for decades
to come. Nonetheless, there was no proportionate adjustment to the policy which was creating these outcomes,
arguably for 50 years. It will be argued, furthermore, that this policy framework generated a heightened vulnerability to
the damaging effects of wider political and economic developments after 1979, and that all of this is consonant with
the broad trends in mortality from that time, and also with the specific developments in terms of the causes of
Glasgow's 'excess mortality'. A substantial part of this mortality, it is suggested, is likely to be traceable to the
misplaced assumption of a 'normative' view of 'modernisation' in the era of 'progress', and one which policy makers
failed to revise in face of mounting, and ultimately overwhelming, contradictory evidence.
153 BSA Annual Conference 2015
Glasgow Caledonian University