Managing illness at work – categorisations, limitations and negotiations

This talk will explore how NHS Scotland systems and processes impact and influence the experiences and decisions of employees working with long-term symptoms and/or conditions. It focuses on the tension between unruly bodies that experience pain, fatigue, incontinence and bleeding, and the structured, often inhospitable landscapes of the contemporary healthcare workplace. I will consider how individuals strive to maintain credibility, job security, and professional inclusion while managing symptoms that are messy, unpredictable, and socially uncomfortable and how they are categorised and managed by their employers.

Drawing on concepts from medical sociology, disability studies, and the sociology of work, I will argue for a more expansive view of what work could be. In doing so, I aim to challenge employment practices that routinely deny or devalue bodily difference. I hope this will invite critical reflection on how we define work, value, and participation and whose bodies are afforded space, legitimacy, and support in paid workplaces under today’s social, economic, and political conditions.

This event will be followed by a buffet lunch

Biography

Jen Remnant is Chair of the British Sociological Association and a Senior Lecturer in the Scottish Centre for Employment Research in Strathclyde Business School, University of Strathclyde. The Centre’s purpose is to produce high quality academic research for policy use in public, private and voluntary sectors focusing on workplace innovation; fair work and job quality; employability; and employment regulation and equality.

Jen’s interests are focused on the intersection of health and work. She is interested in how ill-health is conceptualised in relation to paid labour, and how employers (mis)manage disabled and long-term ill employees at work, especially in workforces that provide health and social care. This includes understanding the influence of organisational policy on the experiences of ill employees, labour market changes, welfare reform, workplace environments, professionalisation and symptom management.

Jen’s research has been funded by the THIS Institute, ESRC, The Addenbrookes Trust, CIPD and the Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness.

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