Sick from Work: The Body in Employment

This work aims to shift the balance of current concerns about individual behaviour and its health effects to an understanding of the social factors that shape both circumstances and behaviour conducive to health. Its focus is the fact that organized work in paid employment is the common experience of most adults before their 60s, and that individuals have widely varied employment security, working conditions and job control that are likely to affect health (for good and ill) beyond working age itself. The book brings together usually disparate work in the sociologies of health and illness and the body; and the sociologies of work and organizations. The work is research-based and the argument is supported with primary data that the author has collected in varied workplaces in Britain - a pottery manufacturer, a food-processing firm and the NHS among them - and with analysis of official statistics and international secondary literature.