Abstract
Health is a fundamental element of human wellbeing. As such, many Corporate Social Responsibility activities are aimed at improving health, typically externally of communities living in the locality of the extraction of energy resources, though also internally of employees. What this chapter advances is that whilst such activity is welcome and demonstrates a willingness for corporations to positively interact with either local communities or their employees, that intervention is predicated on a particular model of health that is limited in its scope and understanding of what drives good or poor health. That bio-medical model of health is contrasted with the social model of health, which prioritises the explanatory power of social processes in conditioning health. Adopting the social model of health not only provides a deeper, richer and more holistic understanding of health, but also invites different courses of action to take in regards to improving health. In terms of community health, action becomes directed not at the provision of healthcare but tackling the social causes of poor health, such as inequalities of various forms. For employee health the familiar approaches of improving health by encouraging exercise, fitness and healthy eating programmes give way to redesigning the structures of a company, so as to allow employees to gain more autonomy and control—the prime drivers of poor health in the workplace indicated in the research literature.
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Notes
- 1.
Medical sociology is a sub-discipline within sociology that focuses on health and illness . Its main contribution has been to draw attention not just to the social aspects of health but that the social is fundamental to any understanding of health.
- 2.
A model in this context refers to a way of thinking about a complex phenomenon rather than a prescription of how reality actually is or how it should be (an ideal-type in the Weberian sense).
- 3.
For a useful analysis of the literature see Priest et al. (2013).
- 4.
Whilst not as stark as previous years women make up 23.5 % of FTSE 100 boards and 18 % of FTSE250 boards in the UK (Davies 2015).
- 5.
The sentence is a paraphrasing of Marx’s famous pithy dismissal of idealism. In many respects resilience can be understood an idealist form of health intervention: by thinking the world in a different way, then the world becomes different. Centuries of debate surround the philosophical merits and demerits of idealism, but in the cold hard material context of the present day workplace I believe that is just as ineffective as the philosophical materialism that irked Marx.
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Yuill, C. (2017). New Directions for Corporate Social Responsibility and Health?. In: Vertigans, S., Idowu, S. (eds) Corporate Social Responsibility. CSR, Sustainability, Ethics & Governance. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-35083-7_7
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