What is genuine sickness? The relation between work‐discipline and the sick role in a pottery factory

Abstract

From material gathered in the author's study of sickness and absence in a pottery factory, it is shown that genuine sickness is routinely problematic, and must be negotiated between the claimant and others in the work‐group, sometimes also management and medical practitioners. Resolutions of the problem are practical and contingent, rarely based on medical proof, actual or imagined. It transpires that gender, age and class relations in the workplace have a bearing on whether and in what terms sickness and/or absence is acceptable. The ambiguities contained in these relations and existing between discourses and techniques of power associated with work‐discipline, worker resistance and medical practice, are reproduced in the negotiation of genuine sickness. Copyright © 1990, Wiley Blackwell. All rights reserved