Session 7b: Stress, Relocation and Reading Bodies
Chair: Bill Albertini

An Alternative to the Concept of Stress as the Linking Mechanism Between Work and Ill-health?
Helen Sampson
Seafarers International Research Centre, Cardiff University, Cardiff, United Kingdom

The nature of the relationship between work and health is one of the central unsolved questions in social research. While work may, of course, directly generate ill-health and disability through injuries and occupational exposure to toxic and carcinogenic materials, much of the impact of work experience on ill-health is thought to be mediated through the experience of stress and the long-term physiological and psychological consequences of exposure to stress.
This paper reviews some of the criticisms (from anthropologists, epidemiologists and sociologists) that have been voiced about the concept of stress as a mechanism for the generation of ill-health. We examine an alternative linking mechanism, Blaxter’s (2003) concept of ‘health capital’. Unlike the economist’s term of the same name, her term is an operationalisation of a lay concept: an accumulated store of health (bodily strength and fitness, immune status, inherited tendencies, physical damage, vulnerability), which although augmentable must eventually be spent, and where the timing and nature of this loss is socially patterned.
We see ‘health capital’ as a particularly useful concept to explore the links between labour intensification and ill-health. As an exploratory study, constituting the first stage of a systematic study of the experience of labour intensification across three contrasted occupations, we examine, in this paper, the possible value of health capital in understanding links between work and ill-health in an international sample of seafarers. The shipping industry is a natural choice for such a preliminary study, since it is the traditional industry has been transformed more than any other by globalising economic processes, with global competition and technological change combining to intensify labour effort in a globalised workforce.       

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Relocating the Social: An Exploration into how Practioners and Therapists make Sense of Health and Healing in Alternative Contexts
Maxine Birch and Nina Nissen
Faculty of Health and Social Care, The Open University, United Kingdom

The alternative contexts described here refer to the practices and professions associated with the provision of alternative and complementary therapies. This area is permeated with stories of healing that stress the connections and balance between the physical, emotional and spiritual aspects of health.  The stories discussed here are from practitioners and therapists who took part in two different ethnographic studies, occurring ten years apart, 1997 & 2007. The first study involved therapists who work with group psychological practices to promote a greater sense of self and improved well-being. In the next study the research participants are practitioners of western herbal medicine who offer a distinct modality to respond to ill health and health complaints.
The analysis of some of the stories of healing, gathered in these different research projects, shows how areas of knowledge, education and training, professional identities and different health practices converge and separate within this framework of healing. A distinct style of talking about health and healing emerges when the therapists and practitioners make sense of their different roles and practices. This style is identified as the main story – ‘the healing story’ that works to unify the diversity of alternative health practices.  In this ‘healing story’ the central character is the ‘facilitator’ who guides and provides the relevant tools for others to follow their own personal journey; that in turn is promised to lead towards better health and a greater sense of well-being. From the identification of this ‘healing story’ the different aspects and interplay of physical, emotional and spiritual health are explored. It is argued that these three key aspects, often described as critical to the understandings of holistic health in these alternative settings, receive varying levels of importance in the telling of the healing story. The different emphases aim to make the process of healing accessible and acceptable for the relevant audience. At the same time social understandings of health rarely appear in the forefront of these stories of healing but still form a significant aspect. This exploration ends by showing how ideas about society, social groups and relationships are often inferred or kept quiet in the ‘healing story’ but are explicitly drawn on when the networks and personal journeys of the ‘facilitators’ are examined further.

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