Working Out

Abstract

This article examines workplace health promotion (WHP) from a critical perspective. Based on a 2-year ethnographic case study of the development of the Associate Recreation Center (ARC) at an automobile manufacturing plant, the study investigates the interrelationships between health promotion discourse and managerial ideology, and the corresponding implications for employees perceptions of health, the healthy body, and personal identity. Analysis suggests that the field of WHP draws on dominant social discourses of health that embody managerialist values. This initiative encouraged employees to adopt managerial-values of self-denial and self-control as the central components of health, producing self-disciplining bodies and hegemonic judgments of self and other.