Personal Blogs

For today’s post, I decided to use a text from a famous author in 20th-century post-structuralist philosophy to critique a flaw in the thinking behind perceptions of corporate wellbeing. As HRM students, we already know that uptake into wellness programs, which are typically designed to coerce seemingly unproductive employees into adopting “healthy habits”, is not always 100% across the board – but also, we know that there are different ways of measuring the power dynamics (referred to as “health nannyism” by one author) and the ultimate success of such programs.

These two points are arguably dependent on a number of broader factors one of which is the conceptualisation of absenteeism. In Ronald J. Ozminkowski’s analysis, the view of absenteeism (a subject that I touched upon in a previous post) serves a particular purpose. What is the intended outcome? Well, because absenteeism is not defined holistically by Ozminkowski, absenteeism could feasibly be due to a very wide selection of causes - little attempt is made to distinguish differences between reasons for employee absence and indeed absence is taken as a given. A troubling view.

Another view here is found in the work of Hull and Pasquale (2017:207) in their article, “Towards a Critical Theory of Corporate Wellness”, which is worthy of discussion. Very rarely do I see the work of French poststructuralist philosopher Michael Foucault cited in conjunction with concepts found in dense non-epistemological topics, but Hull and Pasquale have attempted this. In The Truth of Wellness, Hull, and Pasquale promote the idea that there is a predominant, complete, and resonating “truth”, one which explains the how and why behind corporate wellness programs (and by extension, its causes) to the practice of delivering on corporate wellbeing. This is one that I find to be somewhat denigrating to the idea and definition of universal truth, in and of itself.

Having first been introduced to Michel Foucault by Dr. Sam Mansell (now of the University of St. Andrews) in a presentation Dr. Mansell gave during his time as a Lecturer at the University of Essex, I recalled a paper ResearchGate once suggested, authored by Lemke entitled: “Critique and Experience in Foucault” as being one of the first real excursions into pure philosophy that I was blessed enough to have read as a student.

Lemke (2011) famously translates the work of Foucault in Rarity: Problemization as a History of Truth where he supposes the question: “How do I have to be, in order to be"? Now, if we consider the nature of the question, there are any number of suppositions that could make the above argument concerning the truth of wellness programs by Hull and Pasquale (2017) seem contestable. Truth is something that resonates with us all and is something that we all identify with. So, it is not just a feat of epistemologically unquantifiable proportions to suggest that corporate wellness exists in isolation as a complete perception, but also it is very troubling that a human perception of this should be rendered as evidentially complete.

Just thought I would land that point.

------

This post was written by Alfred Anate Mayaki, a student on the MSc in HRM, and was inspired by the work of Gordon Hull and Frank Pasquale (2017) in an article entitled “Towards A Critical Theory of Corporate Wellness” and the work of Ronald J. Ozminkowski as found in an e-book edited by Ronald J. Burke and Astrid M. Richardsen (2014) entitled "Corporate Wellness Programs"

Not long before I joined the MSc in HRM, I was between program options. My research into what would be my third degree had led me to HRM as a viable route into a postdoctoral role. While considering my options with a skip in my step and a huge bout of consummate optimism, I without hesitation applied to graduate admissions at The London School of Economics & Political Science (LSE) for what was meant to be a 1+3 (MRes + PhD in Employee Relations and Human Resources) - this was in late July by the way - this application ended up being for an MSc in Economics and Management, mainly due to the fact that a hard deadline for the 1+3 program had just elapsed. My only option was to apply for another Uni at short notice or defer my interest until the next academic year.

University application processes are strange things because you can't really apply everywhere, you have enough time and energy to engage in a limited number of applications. Having realised that I had spent the best part of £80 GBP - the set fee that LSE charges for the privilege of tendering its application process, chased multiple academic references for the best part of a month and produced a compelling supporting statement for what turned out to be nothing whatsoever, I decided to channel my efforts towards this distance learning program instead of LSE’s ERHR, maintaining all the prior graft I had accumulated for postdoctoral research.

Considering productivity and well-being in the literature

Whilst in a sort of quasi-transition between these two programs, I uncovered an interesting article by the team at MorganAsh. Now, I don’t wish to be too complimentary to the entire paper, but in the article, the company through its Director, Andrew Gething, speaks eloquently about Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs) and absenteeism in the context of Financial Services. Whilst conducting research on this article, I came across and shared something that popped up in my academic inbox about a term called ‘presenteeism’ a few days ago courtesy of People Management magazine.

To explain, I recently wrote an article on microeconomic wage bargaining which uncovered the effect of shirking on wages. Presenteeism is essentially an extension of the shirking principle. The Brown and Sessions model is interesting because it is cited by Andrew Bryce in his paper which is perhaps the second most authoritative in the literature. Having retweeted Dr. Bryce’s post on X about his paper, which was subsequently the subject of a few exchanges between ourselves via e-mail, it was important for me to draw inferences from this duality to bring closure to my convictions. I, for one, believe that HR professionals must resolve the landscape of factors influencing dysfunctional presenteeism in practice either through soft or hard means. More on this later.

Life is a funny ol’ thing. It would almost certainly have never crossed my mind that, even with my rich vein of experience in HR, I would have stumbled across such valuable a concept as presenteeism and leavism, so early on in my respective journey.

---

This post was written by Alfred Anate Mayaki, a student on the MSc in HRM, and was inspired by the work of Mark L. Bryan, Jennifer Roberts, and Andrew M. Bryce (2022) in an article entitled, “Dysfunctional Presenteeism: Effects of physical and mental health on work performance”.