Individualisation and Commercialisation of Wellbeing and Health. A Social Constructionist Perspective

Abstrakt

Wellbeing and health are becoming an increasingly popular topic in discourses initiated not only by medical doctors, but also by entrepreneurs, experts, and ordinary people. The analysis of the social context of wellbeing and health presented in the article draws attention to the cultural process of constructing these phenomena in an individualistic and commercial direction. With regard to health, social construction manifests itself in the following processes, among others: a change in the way health was understood in the 20th century (a shift from a negative to a positive definition), an emphasis on individual responsibility while reducing the importance of the socio-institutional context, and the commercialisation of health. This process can be interpreted in accordance with Foucault’s concept of dispositif as a tendency to form autonomous individuals fully responsible for themselves. Similar trends can also be observed in the field of wellbeing. Their manifestations include the gradual displacement of the concept of happiness by the idea of wellbeing, the individualisation of wellbeing as a sphere dependent on individual activity, and the commercialisation of wellbeing, especially in the dimension of employee wellbeing. Furthermore, this paper proposes – as a polemical response to the individualisation of health and wellbeing – the concept of holistic wellbeing, which takes into account the impact of the social context in addition to the activity of the individual.