Who cares for wellbeing? Corporate wellness,social reproduction and the essential worker

Abstract

This paper seeks to contribute to the rethinking of wellbeing in organisation studies. First, it contributes to critiques of corporate wellness by drawing on social reproduction theory to show how the wellbeing of every individual worker is dependent on the efforts of many, often unacknowledged, others. Corporate wellness initiatives epitomise the dominant, neoliberal narrative of wellbeing in which individuals are posited as responsible for the maintenance of their own wellbeing. Against this, social reproduction theory highlights the relational, socially distributed and materially grounded character of wellbeing. Second, the COVID-19 pandemic opened an opportunity to radically rethink wellbeing. A social reproduction reading of the category of the essential worker allows us to analyse some of the tensions and contradictions involved in the work of producing wellbeing today. It shows the unequal distribution of both the work involved and of its rewards. In sum, this paper helps extend debates over wellbeing in organisation studies beyond, on the one hand, individualised accounts of wellbeing and, on the other, accounts that ultimately confine understandings of wellbeing to the traditional workplace. It argues for the need for organisational studies of wellbeing to take the wider social reproduction of wellbeing as its starting point.

‘The pandemic, albeit temporarily, albeit momentarily, actually turned the capitalist world the right side up’. (Bhattacharya, 2020b: np.)

Introduction

The 21st century is characterised by an obsession with health and wellbeing (Cederström and Spicer, 2015; Davies, 2015). Bookstores thrive on the trade in self-help books, celebrities push wellness products at extortionate prices, while business leaders wax lyrical about the wellbeing of their overworked and underpaid employees. Alongside these trends, a corporate wellness industry (Harvey, 2019) has emerged that aims to ameliorate the effects of the increasing demands of work in the 21st century by providing professionals, especially in office environments, with skills to handle stress and anxiety. Employee wellbeing is today often sought in training around ‘mindfulness’ and ‘resilience’, or in the use of wearable technologies to enhance bodily health (Moore and Piwek, 2017).

These examples highlight one of the dominant narratives around wellbeing today, in which wellbeing is located within the individual and the individual is seen as responsible for the production and maintenance of their own wellbeing. In this neoliberal storyline, the protagonist is the individual worker who constantly monitors themselves to ensure that they are eating well, getting enough exercise, and are countering any feelings of being overwhelmed, all the while remaining relentlessly productive.

There are many well-established critiques of these kinds of individualised approaches to wellbeing in management and organisation studies and beyond (see, e.g. Dale and Burrell, 2014; Maravelias, 2009; Purser and Milillo, 2015; Walsh, 2018). These critiques have identified how such wellbeing practices reinforce wider trends of individualisation, responsibilisation and depoliticisation under neoliberal capitalism. As these critiques point out, workers are today often directed to see the effects of abundant structural problems as reflections of their own inabilities to adapt or cope (Davies, 2015).

While these critiques are important, they tend to lack a broader acknowledgement of how wellbeing is produced and maintained. The question of ‘who cares for wellbeing?’ not only enables us to think beyond the individual, as existing critiques begin to do, but also far beyond the workplace and the organisational environment itself. This question prompts us to situate the production of wellbeing on the part of the worker into the context of the wider social reproduction of wellbeing, which is undertaken outside the workplace and by other people, both closely and tangentially related to the worker.

Here, we argue, social reproduction theory has much to offer. For at least five decades, Marxist and socialist feminists have been examining the social reproduction of workers (Dalla Costa and James, 1975; Federici, 2012; James, 2012; Quick, 1972; Vogel, 2013). Social reproduction theory has in recent years extended the analysis far beyond the household into all areas where the lives of workers are reproduced (Bhattacharya, 2017b; Ferguson, 2020; Jaffe, 2020). Yet, still today, much of the work of social reproduction crucial to wellbeing remains unacknowledged (Waring, 2018). As we will show, social reproduction theory enables us to see that the wellbeing of each individual worker is heavily dependent on a whole host of overlooked and undervalued work by others.

The COVID-19 pandemic has opened the possibility to radically rethink wellbeing. It has crystallised the fact that wellbeing is a relational rather than a merely individual matter. This relationality has become particularly manifest in the context of the rise of the category of ‘the essential worker’, whose work is deemed foundational to the very functioning of society. These are workers, for example, in food production and delivery, healthcare, sanitation and emergency services (Smith, 2021). The contribution to society of these ‘essential’, ‘key’ or ‘critical’ workers is deemed so important that they must, under conditions of national lockdown, be allowed to continue to go out to work to enable the health and wellbeing of others, even at the risk of sacrificing their own lives. At the same time, it has been noted that these most essential functions in society are overwhelmingly performed by its most vulnerable, marginalised and least valued members (Stevano et al., 2021a). This structural positioning of the essential worker as simultaneously both most and least important, we argue, opens to significant political possibilities for the rethinking of wellbeing and revaluing of social reproduction activities.

A social reproduction reading of the category of the essential worker helps broaden the organisational analysis of worker wellbeing by highlighting not only the relationality of wellbeing but also tensions and contradictions involved in the production and maintenance of wellbeing today. In asking the question ‘Who cares for wellbeing?’ we seek to go – as the call for papers for this special issue puts it – ‘beyond a narrow, individualised approach that has characterised wellbeing in most organizational literature to date’ (Watson et al., n.d.). We also respond to Dale and Burrell’s (2014) call for further analysis of the broader political economy of the corporate wellness industry, including what remains hidden behind its seductive veil.

Our analysis helps to draw out often taken-for-granted elements crucial for worker wellbeing. It makes visible the bridge between production and social reproduction essential to capitalist society. It also allows us to sketch specific power relations at play in this context and raise questions around the consequences of divisions between workers based on gender, race, class, location and citizenship status. It enables us to question the uneven distribution of wellbeing across society, and of the production and maintenance of wellbeing. Furthermore, it allows us to question the uneven recognition of the social contribution of the work of production and maintenance of wellbeing.

In highlighting how the wellbeing of every individual worker is dependent on the broader work of social reproduction, often performed by others outside a particular workplace, our contribution is twofold. First, we demonstrate that the wellbeing of all workers is relational, socially produced and materially grounded, and thus embedded in the world outside the workplace. Therefore, the critique of corporate wellness must incorporate the broader social reproduction of wellbeing if it aims to adequately account for the problems associated with corporate wellness practices. Second, we show that the distribution of the production of wellbeing is fundamentally unequal because most of the social reproductive labour that goes into producing worker wellbeing is undervalued, underpaid, and often made invisible within the capitalist production process. Social reproduction theory points to the diverse forms of labour involved in social reproduction and the intersecting social oppressions that underpin the distribution of this work. Our reading of the category of the essential worker further unpacks the inequalities involved not only in the distribution of this work that supports wellbeing but also of its rewards. The category of the essential worker, we contend, bridges the current gap in organisational literature between social reproduction and worker wellbeing, as the figure of the essential worker makes tangible the relationship between the production of wellbeing outside the workplace and the experience of wellbeing within it.

The paper is structured in three sections. In the first section, we draw out key elements in contemporary critiques of the corporate wellness industry. In the second section, we provide an overview of some of the central tenets of social reproduction theory and illustrate its relevance to the study of wellbeing. In the third section we apply insights from our discussion of social reproduction to a reading of the category of the essential worker to show how it can contribute to existing organisational critiques of wellbeing. We conclude with some reflections on our findings.

Critiques of corporate wellness

The corporate wellness industry encompasses a variety of programmes that ostensibly aim at improving employee health and wellbeing. These can involve a range of offerings, including ‘on-site fitness classes, meditation sessions, chair massage sessions, and special events like rescue puppy visits, pop-up smoothie bars, and Beyoncé dance classes’ (Oppenheim, 2019). The global corporate wellness market was estimated at US$56.7 billion in 2020, with the expectation that it will grow to US$87.3 billion by 2026 (Global Industry Analysts, 2021).

The term corporate wellness is sometimes used interchangeably with related concepts around workplace health promotion (Chu et al., 2000; Holmqvist, 2009), such as organisational wellness (McGillivray, 2005) and wellness at work (Dale and Burrell, 2014; Maravelias, 2009). Some scholars, however, have sought to differentiate corporate wellness from workplace health promotion, with the former focused on improving the economic performance of the worker and the latter more on the broader lifestyles of workers with the aim of reducing long-term illnesses (Harvey, 2019; Zoller, 2003). In this respect, corporate wellness is an attempt to counteract the double-bind of decreasing productivity and increasing absenteeism across the Global North (Mattke et al., 2013). Here the ‘happy productive worker’ is viewed as the magic cure to both (Christensen, 2017; DiMaria et al., 2020).

The corporate wellness movement has been criticised for its individualisation of wellbeing (McGillivray, 2005; Maravelias, 2018; Walsh, 2018), where it ‘tends to detach the individual from their organizational and social context’ (Dale and Burrell, 2014: 162). Here structural elements that clearly have an impact on employee wellbeing, such as workplace conditions, are instead eclipsed by a neoliberal emphasis on individual choice and responsibility:

the contemporary interest in ‘wellness’ or ‘well-being’ obscures some of the earlier concerns for workplace health and safety. Attention has been taken away from the context and conditions of the workplace, and instead has focused on the attitudes and choices of the individual employee and how they can maximize their own ‘well-being’. (Dale and Burrell, 2014: 160)

This individual responsibility for wellness extends well beyond the workplace. Corporate wellness programmes reach into the entire lives and lifestyles of employees, covering habits such as smoking, diet, exercise and mindfulness practices. However, this detour into the lives of workers tends to eventually return to the workplace. In deploying corporate wellness initiatives, ‘management seeks not only greater effort from employees but for employees to make lifestyle choices that increase their capacity to contribute to the firm’ (Harvey, 2019: 642). Thus, although corporate wellness products and techniques appear in the form of everyday individual choices around wellbeing, they ultimately aim to bring back the benefits to the corporation and its goals. Corporate wellness initiatives are therefore ultimately always circumscribed by the demands of the firm.

A key concern around corporate wellness addresses the fact that it ‘extends managerial control beyond the ambit of the workplace’ (Harvey, 2019: 642). Wellness initiatives are often seen as a specific type of management technique, seeking to ‘softly’ manage the mind rather than coercively discipline the body (Costea et al., 2008; Dale and Burrell, 2014). Wellness initiatives have therefore been criticised for seeking to manage the subjectivities of employees, often involving a ‘conflation of the well-being of the individual with the well-being of the firm’ (Dale and Burrell, 2014: 163). Workers are encouraged to internalise corporate pressures to perform, leading to corporate goals being inscribed into personal wellness efforts (Dale and Burrell, 2014; Haunschild, 2003). Workers are always encouraged ‘to contribute more of themselves’ (Harvey, 2019: 641), leading to work intensification rather than increased worker wellbeing. Corporate wellness demands rigorous self-monitoring of one’s feelings, turning every worker into their own ‘inspector’ (McGillivray, 2005: 135).

Mindfulness is one of the most criticised forms of corporate wellness techniques (Bodhi, 2016; Purser, 2019; Stanley, 2012; Walsh, 2018). Despite its foundations in Buddhism, critics have shown how the mindfulness practiced in corporate environments co-opts ideas of interdependence that are central to Buddhism and replaces them with regimes of independence (Purser et al., 2016). In this corporate version, a separation of Buddhist meditation from its social and ethical foundations has led ‘organizational theorists to unwittingly subscribe to a view of mindfulness as an ethically neutral performance enhancement technique’ (Purser and Milillo, 2015: 9). Mindfulness is a prime example of ‘critique turned inwards’ (Davies, 2015: 11). It contributes to depoliticisation as it traps us in ‘silent relationships to the self rather than vocal relationships to each other’ (Davies, 2015: 273). Instead of encouraging political engagement to improve specific collective conditions, ‘the ideological message is that if you cannot alter the circumstances causing distress, you can change your reactions to your circumstances’ (Purser, 2019: 38). Undoubtedly, mindfulness can be a liberating experience. It can alleviate stress and reduce anxiety, which can only be good for some workers in high-pressured environments. But several studies have shown that the self-surveillance required by mindfulness practice can also lead to crippling paranoia, dissociation, panic and physical illness (Farias and Wickholm, 2015; Foster, 2016).

The increasing focus on corporate wellness over workplace health promotion reflects wider trends of individualisation under neoliberalism, especially processes of individual responsibilisation and depoliticisation (Brown, 2015). Neoliberal governmentality ‘embraces the ways in which one might be urged and educated to bridle one’s own passions, to control one’s own instincts, to govern oneself’ (Rose, 1999: 3). Some have argued that a new form of ‘institutionalised individualism’ has emerged in the neoliberal decades, where the individual has become ‘the basic unit of social reproduction for the first time in history’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002: xxii). The individual has become divorced from the wider web of social relations in which it is immersed and forced to take responsibility for reproducing its own wellbeing, often under the name of self-sufficiency (Hull and Pasquale, 2018).

Against this dominant wellbeing narrative that posits the individual as the primary agent of their own wellbeing, critiques of corporate wellness do touch on alternatives. Implicit in many critiques are calls for improving the structural conditions that can help contribute to worker wellbeing, such as improved health and safety practices in the workplace (Dale and Burrell, 2014), or calls for unionisation (Blanchflower et al., 2020). It has also been argued, for example, that both employee wellbeing and improved corporate performance are better served by increasing the basic wage of employees, ensuring employment security and enabling employees to safely voice concerns (Harvey, 2019).

To summarise, then, we identify five key features of the critique of corporate wellness as it currently stands in organisational literature: First, individuals are strongly encouraged to improve their own health and wellbeing to become more productive workers so that they can contribute to the performance of their organisation. Second, workers are encouraged to internalise the organisation’s expectations and failure to do so is coded as a personal shortcoming. Third, what appear as free choices of individual workers, are rather a form of managerial ‘soft’ control over workers where they feel like they must perform to keep up with expectations. Fourth, this managerial control now extends well beyond the workplace to the entire lives and lifestyles of employees, but with the final aim of returning any benefits back to the organisation. Finally, corporate wellness initiatives, and mindfulness practices in particular, have been criticised for not only their individualising but furthermore potentially depoliticising effects.

These critiques identify how corporate wellness instrumentalises worker wellbeing for the purposes of the organisation while simultaneously passing the responsibility of wellbeing production onto the individual worker. This, in turn, helps alleviate corporate responsibility for providing an organisational structure that reduces the structural causes of stress and other forms of illbeing. Still, these critiques generally leave undertheorized the web of social relations outside the workplace in which the worker is immersed, the social relations that in fact reproduce the worker and enable them to go to work in the first place. This is where social reproduction theory can add to the foundation provided by current critiques of corporate wellness, because it allows for a much broader understanding of wellbeing beyond both the individual and their workplace. This is what we turn to next.

Social reproduction theory and wellbeing

Against the narrow, individualised account of wellbeing so popular in organisational contexts, other strands of thought have emphasised the necessarily relational foundations of wellbeing. Feminist economics has long sought to highlight the often invisible work of wellbeing usually performed by those least valued in society (Reid, 1934; Waring, 1988). Such accounts acknowledge the centrality of the unpaid and unrecognised work, often understood under the term ‘social reproduction’, that goes into making activities that are socially and economically recognised and remunerated possible in the first place. Although a comprehensive review of the broader debates around social reproduction remains beyond the scope of this paper, we will here highlight key elements that are valuable for the analysis of the production and distribution of wellbeing.

Social reproduction, as we use the term here, refers to activities that are central to the ‘reproduction of people, and their health and well-being’ (Bakker and Gill, 2019: 506). It is about ‘the maintenance and reproduction of peoples’ lives on a daily and intergenerational basis’ (Ferguson et al., 2016: 28). This perhaps most obviously includes household and care work, whether paid or not, but also many other activities crucial for the regeneration of everyday life. The importance of domestic work to the broader wealth and wellbeing of society was already acknowledged by 19th-century socialists (Ferguson, 2020). In the 1970s, Marxist and socialist feminists situated the household, and in particular housework, at the centre of feminist struggles (Dalla Costa and James, 1975; Rowbotham, 1973). The Wages for Housework movement, for example, argued that ‘the unwaged condition of housework has been the most powerful weapon in reinforcing the common assumption that housework is not work, thus preventing women from struggling against it’ (Federici, 1975: 77).

Social reproduction theory is grounded in a relational ontology of oppressions, including but not limited to those of gender, race, class, sexuality and citizenship. These are interconnected from the start and not merely retrospectively additive (Vogel, 2013). Based on this, it seeks to theorise the integrated totality of productive and socially reproductive activities. Bhattacharya argues that the worldview proposed by social reproduction theory has important political consequences: ‘The understanding of totality as an organic whole rather than an aggregate of parts is important precisely because it has real material implications for how we must choose to act upon that world’ (Bhattacharya, 2017a: 17). For our purposes, social reproduction theory enables us to see that wellbeing in the workplace is dependent upon the wider social reproduction of wellbeing that occurs outside the workplace, and that various forms of intersecting social oppressions are integral to the uneven distribution of this work and its rewards. This kind of broader and more integrated understanding of the production of wellbeing has so far gained far too little attention in organisation studies.

Earlier debates around the importance of housework have gained renewed importance today in the context of contemporary social reproduction theory. A key theme of social reproduction theory is the centrality of labour. It views ‘the labour dispensed to produce commodities and labour dispensed to produce people as part of the systemic totality of capitalism’ (Bhattacharya, 2017a: 2). If workers produce economic value, it asks, then who produces the worker (Bhattacharya, 2017a; Federici, 2012)? While ‘the goal of social reproductive labour is to support life, it is at the same time a means of ensuring adequate supplies of labour power are available to support capital’ (Ferguson, 2020: 111). A key insight of social reproduction theory, then, is the fact that the sphere of capitalist production is not separate from social reproduction, but rather structurally dependent on it. By asking what enables the worker to come to work each day – what reproduces their labour power – social reproduction theorists highlight the fact that a lot of what is taken for granted in accounts of ‘economic’ activities remains hidden and unaccounted for. This invisible and often unpaid work acts as a ‘systematic subsidy’ for capital (Mezzadri, 2019: 38).

Bringing housework to the fore in the context of feminist struggles helped accentuate the role of social reproduction in capitalist production. But, as black socialist feminists argued, this move often ignored the history of black women’s enslaved domestic labour, as well as the fact that black women are often paid for domestic labour in white households (Davis, 1981). This analysis of black women’s labour showed how sexism intersects with other forms of oppressions, such as those based on racism and class. Alongside black feminist calls to decentre the household from struggles over social reproduction, in 1983, Vogel (2013) put forward a more comprehensive examination of women’s oppression within capitalism as a totality, opening up, at the same time, the possibility for a broader understanding of the production of wellbeing. Thinking beyond the household, Vogel’s approach ‘allows for an expanded and diverse array of potential class subjects: all those who work to (re)produce the lives of workers – whether their labour is paid or unpaid, whether they do so within households, state institutions, or as community organizers’ (Ferguson, 2020: 111).

Social reproduction theory thus points to how the ‘production’ of the worker goes far beyond the domestic and care work that takes place within specific households. This broadening of ‘potential class subjects’ enables the work of social reproduction to be thought of not only as women’s work. Conceived in these broader terms, activities of social reproduction are inflected through several prisms:

Under currently existing conditions, this work of reproducing life is gendered, racialized, and sexualized as well as deeply inflected by social and political trends in migration, the movement and ownership of natural resources, environmental decline and environmental racism, the social construction of ability and disability, state policies and repression, and at the same time, social forms of organizing care, desire, embodiment, collective and familial relations. (Arruzza and Gawel, 2020: np.)

This significantly complexifies the question of the social reproduction of wellbeing. It necessitates a broader recognition of the ‘differentially positioned bodies and subjects under capitalism’ (Bohrer, 2020: np.). Not only is wellbeing produced by a number of differentially positioned subjects, but is also dependent on a variety of other structural factors that determine the differential distribution of wellbeing across society. Building on Vogel’s insights, social reproduction theory shows that the relation between social reproduction and production is ‘structured not just by sexism, but by social oppressions in general, from racism and heterosexism to settler colonialism, ableism and beyond’ (Ferguson, 2020: 107).

Bhattacharya (2020a) talks of social reproduction in terms of ‘life-making’. Social reproduction theorists emphasise that this ‘life-making’ work is not only structurally crucial for the recognised activities of capitalist production to be able to take place, but that the devaluation of this work is essential for capital accumulation (Ferguson, 2022; Vishmidt and Sutherland, 2020).

Food, housing, public transport, public schools and hospitals are all ingredients of life-making that socially reproduce workers and their families. The level of access to them determines the fate of the class as a whole, and women still perform the bulk of life-making work globally. But capital is reluctant to spend any portion of its profits on processes that sustain and maintain life. This is why all care work is devalued or unpaid under capitalism while institutions of life making such as schools and hospitals are either constantly privatized or underfunded. (Bhattacharya, 2020a: np.)

This underfunding has been particularly prevalent in recent decades where neoliberal policies have in many ways eroded the conditions for the social reproduction of wellbeing (Stevano et al., 2021b). Economic policies of privatisation and austerity, coupled with ideas of individual responsibility, which are also strongly reinforced by the corporate wellness industry, have directly fed into a ‘crisis of care’, leading both to a ‘care deficit’ (Dowling, 2021; Fraser, 2017; McGee, 2020; The Care Collective, 2020) and a broader ‘crisis of social provisioning’ (Bhattacharya, 2017a: 12). In Canada, for example, the neoliberal shift away from the ‘Keynesian-Fordist consensus’ significantly undermined the infrastructures necessary for social reproduction. In particular, the withdrawal of public provisioning of essential services led to a change in the structure of social reproduction processes:

By default and by design, families, particularly the women within them, picked up the work not provided publicly and not affordable personally. Gender, race, and class were central to the neo-liberal project: as economic restructuring and privatization took hold, existing inequalities in income, opportunities, citizenship, and support were exacerbated. (Bezanson and Luxton, 2006: 5)

Similar dynamics have unfolded in many other parts of the world (Fraser, 2017). Although much of what falls under the umbrella term of social reproduction still remains unpaid and often takes place in or around the home, these reproductive activities are increasingly commodified and thus operate via markets. But even when remunerated they still, as a rule, remain low waged and are often distributed along global value chains. This results in an international division of labour where some work in lower paid jobs under worse conditions in order for others to be able to work in better paid positions elsewhere. The wellbeing of those in better paid jobs is structurally dependent on the work of social reproduction of wellbeing performed by those who are less privileged. This is the case, for example, when migrants leave their own families behind to take care of children of wealthier families in other parts of the world (Farris, 2015; Federici, 2012).

The current pandemic has further intensified both the crisis of care and the inequalities involved. For example, as noted in a recent report: ‘Those on the frontlines of the pandemic – health workers, and those in the informal sector – suffered as a result of wilfully neglected health systems and pitiful social protection measures’ (Amnesty International, 2021: np.). In other words, the social conditions for the reproduction of wellbeing have been dismantled over the last four decades, and the pandemic has exposed and exacerbated the damage of this process on the experience of both individual and collective wellbeing.

Struggles around social reproduction today, as seen through social reproduction theory, span well beyond the household, beyond calls for a sensible work-life balance or the kinds of self-care projects that the corporate wellness industry has to offer. The political potential of the framework lies in its ability to link various struggles around ‘life-making’. More specifically:

struggles over social reproduction encompass much more – including grassroots community movements for housing, health care, food security, and an unconditional basic income; struggles for the rights of migrants, domestic workers, and public employees; campaigns to unionize those who perform social service work in for-profit nursing homes, hospitals, and child-care centers; struggles for public services such as daycare and eldercare, for a shorter work week, and for generous paid maternity and parental leave. Taken together, these claims are tantamount to the demand for a massive reorganization of the relation between production and reproduction. (Fraser, 2017: 35)

By attending to the web of social relations involved in production and reproduction of wellbeing, social reproduction theory opens an approach to wellbeing as a more distributed phenomenon, not bound to a single individual. It encourages us to think of wellbeing as relational, socially produced and materially grounded. It provides a lens that can be applied to shift the perspective and make some of the important but less visible processes and contributions to society more manifest, and in doing so highlighting the often entirely overlooked foundations of wellbeing, both individual and social. A shift in focus from the individual production of wellbeing to broader questions of the production and reproduction of worker wellbeing and, beyond that, social wellbeing, opens to a very different understanding of wellbeing, one that can significantly extend current critiques of wellbeing in organisation studies as manifest in critiques of corporate wellness.

A key point that we want to make here, then, is that the socially distributed and materially grounded work of social reproduction is foundational for worker wellbeing. Some of this work of reproduction may be performed by the worker themselves, as noted and pushed by the corporate wellness industry. But there is also a vast amount of effort and resources going into the production of wellbeing for the worker that is performed by others, often far removed from the individual worker, that often goes entirely unnoticed. This involves the work of the fast food restaurant employee who makes their dinner, the Uber driver who drives them home from the pub at night, the delivery worker who brings them their latest online shopping items, the sanitation worker who empties their household rubbish bins on a regular basis, the partner who does the affective labour of listening to and helping them to process their stressful work problems for the day and maybe also does the majority of the work around the household and childcare, or the migrant domestic worker who regularly cleans up their apartment. All this work foundational for the wellbeing of workers requires more detailed analysis in specific empirical contexts, one of which we will now address below.

Wellbeing and the essential worker

In this section we apply insights from social reproduction theory to the category of the essential worker to draw out lessons for corporate wellness and organisational understandings of wellbeing more broadly. Here we do not seek to provide a comprehensive analysis of the category itself, nor of the political consequences of the category, but rather to mobilise the category theoretically to draw insights on the production and reproduction of wellbeing and how these might allow us to expand the critique of corporate wellness practices. We first reflect on what the category of the essential worker constitutes, and how the pandemic has led to a recognition of the social reproductive work that has long been hidden in capitalist societies. We then turn to think about how the category of the essential worker can help us think more broadly about the production and reproduction of wellbeing, and what this entails for the critique of corporate wellness initiatives.

In the epigraph to our paper, Bhattacharya underscores the fact that despite the long history of struggles for the recognition of the importance of social reproduction work, it is only now with the pandemic that this broad-based societal recognition has been achieved. The pandemic turned the capitalist world ‘the right side up’ in that it forced the socially most important functions to be recognised and thus also to some extent valued, at least symbolically. The most visible agent of this work in the pandemic is the essential worker, who has now widely been hailed as a ‘hero’ for their courage and sacrifice (Leyva del Río and Medappa, 2020; TIME, 2022). The vast majority of the work coded as essential consists, by definition, of activities of social reproduction, activities that enable the continuation of everyday life in society. It is the kind of work that, as often noted in the pandemic, keeps societies going.

The official definition of an essential worker is notoriously nebulous. Who eventually gets coded as such is subject to local conditions and political power struggles (Stevano et al., 2021a). Yet, looking across state and national differences, a clear picture emerges. Essential work is primarily undertaken in care, healthcare, cleaning, food production and delivery, waste management and emergency services, and not, for example, in financial speculation (Bhattacharya, 2020b; Smith, 2021; UK Health Security Agency, 2021). Although there is some essential work that can be conducted from home, such as some critical utilities and infrastructure services, the essential worker tends to be a so-called ‘frontline’ worker who ventures outside their household to perform their work.

While the consensus over what constitutes essential work differs across national and cultural boundaries, ‘there is general agreement that these jobs are low-paid and disproportionately performed by people of colour, women and migrants’ (Stevano et al., 2021a: 186). Essential work is thus, like all social reproductive work, overwhelmingly performed by the least powerful, and most marginalised, underpaid and exploited members of society. The pandemic has precipitated broad symbolic recognition of essential workers and their foundational social contribution, as in the ‘Clap for Our Carers’ movement in the UK (Addley, 2020; BBC, 2020) or the proposed ‘Circle of Heroes’ monument for essential workers in New York (NBC, 2021). Yet there is a powerful anomaly between this symbolic recognition and the profile and conditions of those most likely to perform these essential functions. Essential workers have rightly protested against their poor material conditions despite such symbolic recognition, because despite being called essential, they have routinely been treated as expendable or sacrificial (Coleman, 2020; Gidla, 2020). What is essential, it seems, is the work and not the worker (Jaggers, 2020).

The symbolic recognition of essential workers has helped make visible the role of social reproduction within capitalist societies in a way that allows us to re-think the production and reproduction of wellbeing. Against the individualisation of wellbeing, as common over the neoliberal decades and particularly manifest in corporate wellness initiatives, a social reproduction-based reading of the essential worker highlights the relationality of wellbeing. It emphasises the fact that the wellbeing of some is dependent on the work of others and helps underscore the socially distributed and materially grounded nature of wellbeing. While some were tucked away in lockdown, others were out risking their lives to ensure that the basic means of life flow into households, residues flow out, and basic infrastructural, care and healthcare functions sustaining life continue to be provided as needed. Essential workers play an important part in providing this foundational infrastructure that enables both individual and collective wellbeing in society.

The importance of the social reproductive activities of the essential worker during the pandemic can help us think more broadly about corporate wellness initiatives. Social reproduction theory enables us to see how the wellbeing of employees in a corporate workplace is structurally entwined in the conditions and lives of essential workers, who in significant ways contribute to reproducing the wellbeing of those corporate employees. The wellbeing of the cleaner, caregiver, nurse, teacher, domestic worker, delivery driver, and the like, do not occur on a separate register to the wellbeing of the corporate employee. They are structurally, but unequally, entwined. By recognising this fact, we can add a new layer to the critique of corporate wellness that ties this critique to wider social and political struggles over wellbeing.

In section one we discussed five themes in current critiques of corporate wellness that identify how corporate wellness practices conflate the wellbeing of the individual with the wellbeing of the corporation by: (1) individualising wellbeing; (2) passing responsibility to workers for their own wellbeing; (3) using soft control methods to discipline employees; (4) extending managerial control into lifestyle choices of employees; and (5) depoliticising wellbeing. By integrating insights from social reproduction theory into this existing critique and using the context of the essential worker in the pandemic, we can extend critiques of corporate wellness to account for the social reproductive work that goes into reproducing the wellbeing of employees by others outside the workplace.

An employee might undertake a range of individualised wellbeing practices, but they still require their offices to be cleaned, their children or loved ones to be cared for, food to be produced and cooked for them, their rubbish to be disposed, and many other activities that are external to the corporate workplace. Likewise, lifestyle choices outside the workplace that are supposed to generate better wellbeing for employees are dependent on a host of invisible work that allows people to go to the gym, eat healthily, socialise or the like. Much of this work is undertaken by what are now deemed essential workers, creating a direct causal link between social reproduction and the wellbeing of society, in which the employee that is the subject of corporate wellness practices is immersed. The quality of the social reproduction work performed has direct implications for individual worker wellbeing.

Our key contribution to critiques of corporate wellness, therefore, is to displace the corporate worker from the centre of attention by broadening the understanding of what wellbeing consists of and how, and in particular by whom, wellbeing is produced. What is essential for wellbeing is conceived very differently between the corporate wellness discourse and social reproduction theory. The production of wellbeing is much more socially dispersed and materially grounded than the corporate wellness literature generally allows.

Our discussion furthermore highlights the uneven distribution of wellbeing between workers, where some are locked-down for safe-keeping, whereas others are sent out – even without adequate protective equipment – to risk their lives to ensure the wellbeing of others. A focus on the wellbeing of the essential worker, as opposed to the generally more highly paid and at times locked-down corporate employee, highlights tensions around whose wellbeing is cared for in corporate wellness practices, and at whose expense. This kind of a shift in focus underscores an often unacknowledged assumption in the corporate wellness literature, where the employee tends to be the professional office worker rather than the factory floor, public transport, grocery store or sanitation worker. Although, it must be acknowledged, corporate wellness initiatives do increasingly reach other strata of the workforce also, as for example in Amazon’s recent, and much criticised, attempt to introduce the ‘AmaZen’ mindfulness booth in its warehouses (Paul, 2021).

Our analysis also has important implications for the rethinking of wellbeing in organisation studies. It points to a need for a much broader relational, socially distributed and materially grounded understanding of the production and reproduction of wellbeing than is often currently the case. Our aim here, ultimately, is to not only decentre the worker but also the organisation in contemporary understandings of wellbeing within organisational studies.

The critiques of corporate wellness that we discussed above often outline how the responsibility for wellbeing has been passed from the organisation to the worker. But even these critiques still locate wellbeing production within a world that has the organisation at the centre. The wellbeing of the worker, therefore, is conceived through the worker’s embeddedness in the world of the organisation and ceases to adequately account for the world outside the organisation, the social world in which we are all embedded.

By decentring both the worker and the organisation from understandings of wellbeing in organisation literature, we can start to understand how worker wellbeing is dependent on a host of ‘life-making’ activities that seem to have no direct connection to the organisation itself, and yet without these activities, workers would not be in a position to work at all, never mind look after their own wellbeing. Social reproduction theory enables us to see the invisible within the capitalist production process, to see how the social reproductive labour of the most marginalised groups in society is structurally entwined in the work often understood as productive labour. Within the context of wellbeing, specifically, social reproduction theory allows us to demonstrate that worker wellbeing is not simply an effect of the worker’s lifestyle or organisational structures, but is constitutive of the structure of society itself, especially in terms of how the capitalist production process engenders specific social inequalities. The very concept of corporate wellness symbolises this, as it suggests that wellbeing is only a concern for those in the most secure, well-paid and visible jobs.

The pandemic made the importance of the work of social reproduction performed by essential workers undeniable. Yet the cultural recognition of this fact has not, at the time of writing at least, translated into any significant material change in conditions or remuneration for these workers. As many essential workers point out, although symbolic gratitude for their efforts abounded, their lives were still treated as expendable in the broader social effort to save the lives of others. This became particularly manifest because of the disadvantaged position of the majority of these workers that were sent to the ‘frontline’ to risk their lives. Some strata of society have always been treated as ‘surplus populations’ (Farris, 2015). The rise of the essential worker in the pandemic, however, made this fact so obvious that it could not be denied anymore, thus bringing to the surface this rift between the importance of the work performed versus the value ascribed to those performing it.

Our analysis has implications for strategies targeting worker wellbeing. The production and maintenance of wellbeing necessitates much more than mere individual acts of self-care. Whereas the corporate wellness discourse assumes that such efforts suffice, social reproduction theory clearly draws out the much broader basis that underpins individual wellbeing efforts. It demonstrates that a much broader set of factors need to be accounted for than what corporate wellness strategies, or even critiques of them, currently address.

Furthermore, our discussion points to the fact that the wellbeing of particular workers depends not only on the wellbeing work of specific others, but to some extent also on the very wellbeing of these others. It is difficult to maintain worker wellbeing without significant care for the wellbeing of those many others whose efforts are crucial for the wellbeing of particular, individual workers. This means much broader demands on those seeking to improve worker wellbeing within organisations, demanding that they also take into account the wellbeing of those who contribute to the production and reproduction of the wellbeing of their workers at a distance. Learning from the experiences and demands of essential workers, this contribution needs to go beyond mere symbolic acknowledgement and into significant material redistribution.

By thinking about wellbeing through the lens of social reproduction theory, we have shown that critiques of corporate wellness would benefit from taking into account the often intersecting oppressions that occur outside workplaces, which work to make invisible certain individuals and social groups, undermining both the recognition of their role in the production of societal wellbeing and their own individual wellbeing. Rather than thinking how corporate organisations might better incorporate wellbeing into their structures while maintaining productivity and accumulation, we are suggesting that the rise of the essential worker during the pandemic, and the increased visibility of some social reproductive labour that comes with it, represents an opportunity to imagine what kinds of organisations might be built if we started from acknowledging the relational, socially distributed and materially grounded character of wellbeing.

In the same way that organisations need to think beyond the workplace and the worker when it comes to wellbeing, the critique of corporate wellbeing in organisation studies needs to think beyond the organisation as the central locus of wellbeing production. Doing so requires organisation studies to see the very concept of wellbeing as tied up in much larger systems of domination, including global capitalism, patriarchy and colonisation. The transnational flows of capital and people, for instance, might appear incidental to corporate wellness, but many migrant workers play an important role in producing corporate employee wellbeing precisely because these workers perform tasks that are essential to the functioning of society. But many of these workers are routinely exploited because of their precarious residency statuses. Thus, even though they might do important social reproductive labour that secures the wellbeing of others in society, their own wellbeing is undermined by the way that global capitalism distributes flows of goods and people. Likewise, greater pay equality between men and women might on the surface appear to improve employee wellbeing or organisational structures, but not if heteronormative forms of household labour remain in place outside of the workplace, where women perform the majority of care work and domestic labour in the household. Forms of oppression that severely undermine the wellbeing of some people, irrespective of whether these people are directly involved in corporate working environments or not, are also forms of oppression that enable corporate organisations to function in the way that they do.

Our analysis points to a need for a much broader relational, socially distributed and materially grounded understanding of the production and reproduction of wellbeing than is often currently the case. It pinpoints the need for wellbeing to be approached as a social rather than individual phenomenon, with broader support required for a wider body of individuals and organisations involved beyond specific workers. The rise of the essential worker in the pandemic has opened an opportunity for both a radical rethinking of what constitutes wellbeing and of who is responsible for it. We hope that this paper contributes to a broadening of these debates around wellbeing and, ultimately, to a more just distribution of both wellbeing itself and the rewards for the work involved in the social reproduction of wellbeing.

Finally, the critique of corporate wellness in organisation studies must incorporate the insights of other disciplinary approaches, including, but not limited to, sociology, gender studies and critical theory, and decolonial and migration studies if it is to paint an adequate and comprehensive picture of wellbeing in organisational environments. Social reproduction theory can help link these various disciplinary approaches to wellbeing, because it shows us that wellbeing is fundamentally relational, and thus systems of oppression that denigrate the wellbeing of some will, in some shape or form, impact the wellbeing of all. Our hope is that our contribution can help extend the theoretical foundation for further analyses of both employee wellbeing and the role of the essential worker and others in relation to it.

Conclusion

With this in mind, we return to the central question of this article: Who cares for wellbeing? As existing critiques suggest, corporate wellness initiatives assume that the individual worker cares for their own wellbeing. These critiques show the limits of such an assumption by highlighting the structural causes of employee illbeing and the desire of corporations to pass responsibility for wellbeing onto individual employees, all the while subtly manipulating these wellbeing efforts for their own purposes. However, these critiques still overlook the important part that broader processes of social reproduction play in the production and maintenance of worker wellbeing.

Social reproduction theory enables a more comprehensive approach to the ‘who’ of our question. In asking who produces the worker, it also proposes to situate the ‘who’ that produces wellbeing both outside the individual employee and beyond their workplace. This opens critiques of corporate wellness to the extensive, often invisible and undervalued work that goes into the everyday social reproduction of wellbeing. At the same time, it allows us to think about the differential social, cultural, political and economic status of workers, since those who do the foundational work of the social reproduction of wellbeing are often the least empowered and resourced members of society. The ‘who’ in ‘who cares for wellbeing?’ is thus difficult to identify exactly and concretely, because the social reproduction of wellbeing is performed not only by an employee’s closest relations, but also a host of paid and unpaid workers, some of whom the employee might never meet.

The emergence of the category of the essential worker in the pandemic momentarily enabled the importance of social reproduction activities to be broadly and publicly acknowledged. It enabled societies to identify one specific body that clearly contributes to the production of wellbeing. It furthermore helped to concretely highlight the relationality of wellbeing, its material foundation, and not only point to the socially distributed nature of the production of this wellbeing, but also the tensions and contradictions involved in the contemporary production and distribution of wellbeing across society. The rise of the category of the essential worker shows, in a tangible manner, how many of the most important social functions today are performed by a society’s least valued members, and how the wellbeing of these specific workers is sacrificed for the wellbeing of others. These kinds of tangible tensions make the category of the essential worker politically important today, opening to the possibility of a new politics of redistribution.

There is still scope for further organisational analysis around the category of the essential worker, in particular around its role in helping to make some social reproductive activities more visible, perhaps at the expense of others, such as unpaid work in the household. The impact that the shift to work from home in lockdowns has had on social reproduction and the distribution of wellbeing also warrants further study, as does the actual political organising arising out of the emergence of the essential worker as a unifying category for a swathe of differentially oppressed low-paid workers. In addition, the wellbeing of essential workers themselves, including differences between the conditions of essential workers in the Global North versus the Global South, remain important topics for further analysis.

We hope here to have sufficiently demonstrated, through our discussion of the essential worker, the importance of the often invisible work of social reproduction that goes into the production of wellbeing, largely by many of the most marginalised, undervalued and underpaid members of society. We can no longer live in the illusion that individuals or organisations can create wellbeing on their own. Hence we argue for the need of organisational analyses of wellbeing to go well beyond both the individual and their workplace by taking the broader social reproduction of wellbeing as their starting point.