Depoliticised labour reform: Policy discourse analysis of workplace wellbeing

William J. Fleming

Abstract

Critical management scholars now frequently designate workplace wellbeing as a managerial technology of control. Among several points of criticism, organisational wellbeing solutions are viewed as ineffective, instrumental, discriminatory, individualistic, and coercive. Yet, increasingly, workers’ wellbeing is an explicit public policy concern enacted prior to and alongside organisational settings. Identifying workplace wellbeing as such can expand extant critique to recognise it as a hegemonic project, and, specifically, a discourse of depoliticised labour reform. This argument is abductively developed through analysis of a resource hub backed by the UK government, using the What’s the Problem Represented to Be approach as a guide, and combining both qualitative and computational methods. I show wellbeing is problematised in four ways: individual, economic, cultural, and voluntary. Each of these problematisations deploys depoliticising strategies which reproduce dominant employment relations. The workplace wellbeing policy discourse is a sincere, corporate-led attempt to improve workers’ experiences of employment, but through strategies that are limited by an avoidance of contestation and regulation, as well as a mystification of both the harms of work, critiques of social justice, and more proactive solutions which would engage with working conditions. Therefore, workplace wellbeing discourse is both a product and continuation of the liberalisation and depoliticisation of employment relations.