Back to balance: Labour therapeutics and the depoliticisation of workplace distress

Abstract

This article assesses the rise in diverse workplaces of what the author terms “labour therapeutics”—the application of therapeutic ideas and interventions to the understanding and management of employee distress. By way of an inductive narrative analysis of five institutional proponents of labour therapeutics, it concludes that the interventions and understandings labour therapeutics promote, by either individualizing employee distress or reducing it to the micro-arrangements of the workplace, inadvertently depoliticize the problem of work for growing numbers of individuals and organizations in the contemporary work setting. Further research is requested to explicate the confluence between neo-liberal working objectives and the new forms of labour therapeutic governance now in rapid ascent. This article is published as part of a collection entitled ‘On balance: lifestyle, mental health and wellbeing’.