Over the last three decades, stress and other forms of suffering at work (including burnout, mobbing, bullying and issues relating to the work-life balance) have emerged as important social and medical issues in Western countries. However, there is an ongoing debate about the existence of stress as a category in itself. It is not, as many argue, a well-defined clinical, biological and psychological state which affects people in the same way in different cultures and at different times. Stress has been studied in different ways. Each discipline constructs its own scientific object, scope of analysis, and scientific validation method. To illustrate these differences, neuropsychologists would say that “it is not the environment which causes stress and health hazards, but hormones , and the biochemistry of the body” (because two people in the same environment could react differently to a given situation). A psychologist might add that “the individual reactions to the environment cause the biochemical reactions and thus, stress”. For the sociologist, finally, the social environment contains structural constraints which affect individual and collective resources, therefore determining the margins of operation and the possibilities of control, the definition of the situation and the identification of the difficulties and future experiences of well-being. This latter interpretation is more difficult to establish but could raise interesting and important questions.
Despite the lack of empirical data supporting the clinical, biological and psychological causes of stress, most experts, academics and stakeholders in the stress management field behave as if stress were an objective illness, clearly diagnosable and definable in different social and cultural contexts. Yet research clearly shows that the same apparently objective working conditions generate widely different responses from employees in the same organization, or between employees in different organizations or fields. This cannot be easily explained by individual differences. Likewise, research on stress has gained a cultural significance over the last 20 or 30 years. Stress has shifted from being something presumably experienced by the “weak” or maladjusted employee to being now considered almost a normal—and to some extent inevitable—consequence of life in contemporary organizations. Add to these issues the fact that across Europe and North America employers are increasingly being held accountable for the well-being of their employees, as shown by the growing concern with the increasing amount of policies on workers’ well-being. It becomes apparent that stress cannot easily be understood if isolated from the organizational, social and historical conditions in which it develops.
Analysing stress as a social construct helps understand these changes and controversies. This book explores different aspects of the social constructionist theory and its methods, provides a critique of the prevailing discourse on work-related stress and introduces a radically new approach to the concept of suffering at work. By treating stress as a socially constructed phenomenon, we are not suggesting that it does not exist as a real and major dimension of an individual’s emotional and psychological experiences. Rather, through the different scholarly contributions in the following chapters, we aim to problematize the idea that stress can be understood as the measurable consequence of given social conditions. We argue that the picture is far more subtle and complex and requires a more thorough investigation and assessment of current approaches to stress management and treatment.
This introduction will set out how the different chapters relate to the overall theoretical approach we adopt and how they come together to offer a theoretically informed critique of current, mainstream approaches to stress and stress management .
What Is “Social Constructionism”?
According to Berger and Luckmann (1966), “the analysis of the social construction of reality” focuses on “processes by which any body of ‘knowledge’ comes to be socially established as ‘reality’”. The aim is to go beyond the opposition between “objectivism” and “relativism”. When subjective representations are enshrined in language, institutions, norms and practices, they are perceived as real objects existing independently of the observer. Discourses and theories may be performative because reality is always observed and perceived through the prism of social knowledge and representation, which means that no matter how reified or taken for granted a given object is, it is always open to change as ideas and knowledge evolve. Knowledge of society is thus a realization in the twofold sense of the term—first, in making sense of the objectified social reality and second, in producing this reality. For instance, defining and characterizing a difficult situation as stressful means picking out relevant sensory details supporting such a typification, and likely also ignoring any ambiguous or contradictory information. The interaction between word and world creates “looping effects ” (Hacking 1999). That is, some categories or classifications may seem relevant in particular social situations and not in others, but in turn, categories or classifications frame the situation in particular ways. For instance, the individualized management of workers may explain why some conflicts in the workplace are understood as “moral harassment ” or “bullying ”. However, these notions will reinforce the perception of problems at work as individual and psychological questions.
Social constructionism is often misunderstood. It is often said that social constructionism is restricted to agentic processes of intentional and conscious production. Searle (1995) wrote that the construction of social or institutional facts depends on “collective intentionality”, and that the creation of social reality is a “collective intentional imposition of function on entities that cannot perform those functions without that imposition”. As Berger himself admitted in 2009, perhaps the word “construction” was unfortunate, as it suggests a creation ex nihilo—as in: “There is nothing but our constructions”. But this was not the authors’ intention. What they proposed was that reality was subject to socially derived interpretations (Berger and Zijderveld 2009: 66, quoted in Sica 2016). With respect to emotions, for instance, Eda Ulus and Yiannis Gabriel (2016) wrote that “A fundamental tension between social constructionist and psychoanalytic conceptualizations of emotions is that the former approaches them as consciously constructed and cognitively worked through phenomena, while the latter sees them as bound up with fantasies and transformed through unconscious defence”. This fundamental opposition between social constructionist and psychoanalytic approaches is neither helpful nor accurate. First of all, the Freudian concept of the unconscious may be included in constructionist approaches, as it is viewed as a discursive resource—a way of talking. Secondly, other forms of unconscious or non-conscious processes may also be included (i.e. the effect of incorporated social prejudices, unquestioned routines, incentives produced by management tools, etc.). Social construction is thus best understood as a metaphor. Bruno Latour (2006) illustrates this using the image of a house being built through the combined efforts of different stakeholders—architects, builders, real estate developers and so on. One can imagine that the result is close to what these people expect. But, if one imagines the social construction of a town, the result will be much less certain as it depends on numerous potentially contradictory strategies of a multitude of different stakeholders, including municipal services, urban planning services, businesses, inhabitants and private real estate developers. The idea of “social construction” is rendered more complex by the importance of meaning and social representations. Meanings and representations are not like buildings—they cannot be seen nor touched. But they guide people in their actions and have objective and even concrete consequences.
Social Constructionism Is About Labelling
Hacking (1999: 48) defines constructionism as “various sociological, historical, and philosophical projects that aim at displaying or analysing actual historically situated, social interactions or causal routes that led to, or were involved in, the development or establishment of some present entity or fact”. He adds that “Ways of classifying human beings interact with the human beings who are classified”, not only because these classified humans and other people they are in interaction with adapt or react to their classification, but also because of the overall “complexity of institutions” and “network of practices” which back the classification and keep it up to date. Thus, for instance, “stressed” individuals are those who use the label of “stress” to explain and account for some of their internal and external experiences when speaking to a doctor. To receive this diagnosis adds legitimacy to the label via the power and sanctity of the medical profession as an institution. Several chapters deal with these issues albeit in different ways. For example, Penny Dick’s chapter examines how the experience of stress and reactions to it may be both an outcome and a medium of the articulation of professional ideologies which prescribe professional conduct. Using the examples of social work in police and hospital contexts, she illustrates how such ideologies may help or hinder individuals’ interpretations of their working environments and their visceral responses. Where such ideologies hinder these interpretations, stakeholders may question their truthfulness and logic and work to disrupt such ideologies.
Perceptions of medical theories and labels are embedded in occupational and professional contexts. “The stress discourse is a historically, socially, and institutionally specific structure of statements, terms, categories and beliefs that are embedded in institutions, social relationships, and texts” (Scott 1990, quote in Thunman and Persson 2015). In their study of clerical workers in a Canadian city, Harkness et al. (2005) show that participants used the repertoire of stress to provide a socially acceptable way of expressing discomfort and regaining a sense of importance in the organization, and to defend the idea that, as “good” professionals, individuals have to cope with pressure and stress. Stress discourses appear to be a socially conditioned response, governed by implicit rules about when, how and where it is appropriate to express certain emotions and frailty (Thunman and Persson 2015).
In some cases (i.e. for managers or nurses ), claiming to be stressed may be a sign of intensive and difficult work. Not being stressed could mean one is not working hard enough. But being overstressed could also imply a lack of control over one’s work and hence a lack a professionalism. In other cases, the stress label may be interpreted as individualistic. Traditionally, for industrial workers, complaints about stress were interpreted as some kind of outbreak of personal subjectivity that could discredit or undermine collective struggles. Someone who complained, and whose complaint might not have been justified by age or the work position, might not only be suspected of looking out too much for themselves, but also of dodging their work. Such behaviour undermines the ideology of collective resistance, and of the necessary strength and courage in the face of the fatigue and pain that one is to endure. This matches the obligation to protect the myth of the worker fully dedicated to the productive effort and proud of their social role, long shaped by trade unions and left-wing parties (Loriol 2016). In their contribution to this book, Väänänen and Varje also stress the role of the individual workers themselves. They emphasize both how the workers have used the publicity around work-related stress for their own political purposes, and how the medical dialogue between patients and occupational health professionals has evolved with the changing cultural outlook of the patients themselves. Väänänen and Varje thus see workers as active agents in the experience and interpretation of work-related stress.
During collective bargaining between worker unions and employers, stress may be an avenue for constructing a social compromise in so far as the difficulties experienced by workers and health hazards are recognized—however, no major challenges are set for organizations. Stress management methods are mainly directed at providing support and training for individuals. In other cases, stress is denied by employers or viewed as problems unrelated to one’s professional life. Unions try to capitalize on workers’ mental health problems in order to back up their claims in a period of weak social protest. In other cases, unions may consider that management uses the stress label in an individualistic manner, reducing stress problems to a question of training and psychological support. Therefore, they no longer communicate about stress and prefer to talk about working conditions, management practices and organizational matters, or about exploitation, alienation, domination and so on (Loriol 2017).
Understanding these different uses of the stress label is necessary if adequate measures are to be taken to prevent stress, develop effective programs addressing mental health at work and to...