Health Capital - Why are they running?

1
Health Capital -Why are they running?

• Health Capital how do we understand body
  strategies and investments in the Nordic welfare
  States?
• A theoretical contribution

2
30 years ago

• health trend - boom
• training, running
• fitness
• diet counseling
• ..
• ..

3
Flow or Investment?

• Psychological flow-experience
• Biomedical Endorphins ("endogenous morphine")
• Sociological Are use of plastic surgery,
  monitoring of the body, diet/physical training-
  investment (distinctive) strategies?
• Large differences high/low positioned (30 years,
  smoking, diet, training, surgery..)
• As the society is changing (transformation of
  society withdrawal of the welfare state and
  also change of professions)?

4
Health Capital!..

• a possible new capital?
• The body and the Health within the last 20-30
  (and even more last 10) years are turning to be
  seen upon in a new way
• The body is an object of investment with even
  more and more energy and resources (economic,
  cultural, social including TIME invested in it?

5
Field and - capital

• Change of the marked (the social space/ the
  social field) that creates this type of health
  capital.
• marriage market
• recruitment market
• labour marked
• health insurance market
• housing market
• leisure market
• ..
• ..

6
Outlines of explanations
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genesis of a taste for health

• 1) An immersion in a wider field of symbolic
  manipulation (Bourdieu 1985).
• Science and, in particular, health science has,
  over time, supplanted religion symbols in the
  social space, installing psychologists,
  psychoanalysts, doctors, sexologists, life
  coaches, body therapists, nature
  healers/therapists, and instructors as the new
  priesthood (Bourdieu's phrase).
• These positions take part in the struggle to
  provide the laity with advice about how to live
  via health, healing, and spiritual and bodily
  care.

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genesis of a taste for health

• 2) Another feature affecting the taste for health
  relates to how the ingestion of food and
  beverages over time, established as a relatively
  autonomous field of knowledge such as 'eating',
  becomes 'nutrition'.
• 3) A third feature relates to how ritual games
  and festive entertainment again in a historical
  perspective are transformed into 'sport' and,
  along the way, established as a competitive field
  (Bourdieu 1981).

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genesis of a taste for health

• 4) More capitalism, the reduction
  withdrawal/pulling out, of the state from
  different welfare areas. State is more
  administering systems than running them.
• Individualisations the shaping of a subject
  Patients/clients as subjects (patient
  organisations)
• Identity change of subject We are all
  Pre-patients (Rose 2009)
• Change of policy NPM more republican-conservative
  government
• More pressure on the health care system (people
  get older invention of new diseases more
  diseases/treatment little increase in
  workforce/production relative - reduced
  resources)
• Private industry (hospitals), More prioritizing
  in health care system (classification of
  patients, Triage, new phenomenon is waiting
  time/latency in relation to medical treatment and
  surgery- Relative privileging of the privileged
  and relative dis-privileging of the
  dis-privileged social groups

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The state and - what is healthy?

• Meta-field - large effect on the health field -
  via production of classifications ex on the
  social world, including ones own body, its
  physiognomy, skin, size, weight etc.
• Classifications translated to cognitive
  perceptions associated with the body, such as
  healthy or unhealthy, normal or pathological,
  nice or disgusting, fit or unfit.
• The effect of the states efforts is hardly
  noticed as the state creates a political doxa,
  that is, an array of official classifications
  that become practical, taken-for-granted
  understandings of the social order (Bourdieu
  quoted in Swartz 2004, p. 13).

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What is health capital
12
3 forms of health capital

• embodied state,
• body level, performance, incl. normality in
  terms of serum cholesterol, body mass index..
• objectified form
• related to physical artifacts such as buildings,
  health and medical technologies, and treatments
  and services.
• institutionalized form
• as in health legislation, instructions, health
  certificates, professional certification
  (diet-instructor..) and titles, authorized
  health theories.

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The embodied state

• Individual and group investment

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Investment and distinction

• Dominant social groups will act and look
  natural when investing in the body as their
  values are naturalized,
• similar to how upper middle class dominate the
  school and educational system (Bourdieu and
  Passeron 1977).
• Some dominated social groups do overinvest in
  the body (fitness, muscles, diet and surgery).
• The dominant social groups perceive this as
  vulgar, not appropriate or as bizarre

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Violence - power

• Symbolic violence (inner domination)
• Dominated positions - view their own physiognomy
  as out of proportion, inadequate and associated
  poor health with bad moral and poor choices.
  (state-authorized definitions of body mass index,
  body proportions, size and weight)
• Physical violence (outer domination)
• Long-term unemployed people / people on sick
  leave required to participate in physical
  training as a condition for receiving benefits,
  as has been the case in Denmark in the 2000s (cf.
  Horneman-Møllers chapter in this volume).
• Also Job and obesity-smoking-BMI-alcohol.
• Hospital treatment and surgery, obesity..

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health capital, inequality and connection to risk

• Health investment - also a strategy to reduce
  ones risk of morbidity and mortality
• (even if, as we have emphasized, health capital
  does not necessarily translate into health
  improvements).
• The fact that higher-positioned groups have
  further distinguished themselves by reducing risk
  more than lower-positioned groups means that
  social risk in the Nordic societies has, and is
  likely to continue to become, more unequally
  distributed.

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• To sum up..
• Certain social groups tend to stabilize or
  improve social position in the social space in
  new ways, and we ask how and how can it be?
• We argue that new types of investment strategies
  are actualized in the body, not only as
  cultural but also as healthy?
• Individual investment strategies in health
  capital are constituted as a response to changes
  in the state, to changes in the health system,
  and to changes in other fields
• Health capital is an extra card in the social
  game and it makes a distinctive difference. When
  agents are equal in possession and composition of
  capital (income, education and networks) health
  capital can make the distinctive difference to
  get a job or to stay on the labor market etc.

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Field and - capital

• We some- Diet, Run, Jog..
• to get a wife, a job, a house, a health
  insurance..
• It is the change of the marked (the social
  space/ the social field) that creates this type
  of health capital.
• marriage marketrecruitment market labour marked
  health insurance markethousing marketleisure
  market
•