Therapeutic management in the low-wage workplace

Bibliographic Data

ID4600682
AuthorsE H Ruppel (0000-0003-4663-5629, University of California, Berkeley, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume352
Pages117026
Publication date2024-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueSocial Science & Medicine (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0277-9536 • E-ISSN: 1873-5347
PublisherElsevier BV (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1016/j.socscimed.2024.117026
PMID38838531
OpenAlexW4399116820
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited38

Medicalization represents an increasingly significant form of social control. Emergent evidence suggests that workplace managers take up medicalized practices and discourses to produce a compliant labor force, but this phenomenon has received limited sociological attention. This paper extends prior theories of medicalization to investigate therapeutic management in the low-wage workplace. I draw upon eight months of ethnographic fieldwork in Disability Works, a nonprofit job training program for people with mental illnesses, and interviews with other providers and advocates within this field. Disability Works harnesses therapy, psychiatry, and "softer" therapeutic practices such as mindfulness meditation, sleep hygiene, and positive affirmations to produce its workforce. This paper identifies two dimensions of therapeutic management: (1) it aims to inculcate work norms at the level of client-workers' embodied dispositions, and (2) it aims to transform structural problems into individual ones. Findings illuminate therapeutic management as an emergent workplace regime and may guide future research on its effects

Embodied cognition · Medicalization · Mindfulness · Political science · Psychiatry · Psychotherapist · Public relations · Sociology · Workforce · Emotional Labor in Professions · Employment and Welfare Studies · Management and Organizational Studies · Psychology