Governments need individuals to be willing and able to work as they age. Yet, studies of older individuals' employability report that labor markets become more rather than less restrictive when it comes to employing older people. The Swedish labor market is a case in point. Recent surveys and governmental reports show that job seekers' employability begins to decrease when they are in their 40s. Through interviews with jobseekers, employer representatives, and human resources and recruitment specialists, the paper examines the employability of older individuals in Sweden. It focuses on knowledge-intensive service occupations, where seniority and age may be considered strengths rather than mere liabilities. It shows that individuals who are proactive about their professional development and strive to ‘age well’ are still excluded from recruitment processes because of their age. Yet, they are not excluded due to ageism in the form of negative prejudice against older job seekers. Rather, they are excluded because employers and recruiters perceive them as being too focused on professional development and lacking the naïve, ‘just-do-it’ mentality of younger job seekers. Furthermore, their professionalism and experience are viewed as factors that make them stand out as potential threats to the managerial hierarchy. Using a governmentality lens, the study contributes to critical research on the intersection of successful aging and employability discourses by addressing a question this research raises but has left unanswered: why are younger job seekers sometimes preferred over older ones, even when employers know they are less skilled, less experienced, and not as proactive or eager to develop professionally? The analysis reveals a rift in the ableism reinforced by the neoliberal discourses on successful aging and employability. While they explicitly emphasize self-governance and proactivity, they implicitly build on individuals' subjection to hierarchical control. The older job seekers match the explicit precepts of the neoliberal discourses yet are excluded because they fail to match the implicit ones. The analysis, therefore, suggests that age is the factor revealing this divide within neoliberal governmentality.

This paper accounts for a study of the largest employer in Scandinavia of jobseekers with designated impairments. Like many similar organizations, this organization has undergone a transformation from a provider of ‘sheltered work programs’, which remove this category of jobseekers from the labour market, to a provider of ‘individual placement programs’, which instead integrates them in the labour market. I use Foucauldian governmentality studies to show how this transformation problematizes basic assumptions underlying organizational disability studies. While these studies are variegated, they have generally found that jobseekers with designated impairments are often treated as disabled, as less employable than non-impaired individuals and in need of care and rehabilitation. The study presented below points in another direction. It shows that jobseekers’ designated impairments are treated as signs of their special abilities for particular jobs, rather than as signs of their disabilities. These findings, I argue, are illustrative of how a neoliberal governmentality tends towards replacing the distinction between the able and the disable with a bio-medical structuring of different qualities of human capital. While it leads to that individuals with impairments are integrated in the labour market, I argue that it also leads to that they are treated as having an exclusive, medically designated fit for simple and often dirty labour.

This paper accounts for a study of the joint ambitions of the Swedish Public employment office and social enterprises to integrate jobseekers with impairments in the labor market. The number of jobseekers with impairments has increased in western labor markets. The Swedish labor market is a particular case in point. Why? I use critical disability studies in combination with Marxist studies on immaterial labor to develop the following answer: An increasing number of jobseekers are diagnosed as impaired, not because their bodily constitution makes them unfit to handle manual labor, but because their socio-cultural characteristics make them unfit to handle immaterial forms of labor. Furthermore, I show how the diagnosis of these jobseekers as impaired does not lead to that they are also considered disabled. On the contrary, they are considered to have a particular, bio-medically defined fit and ability when it comes to handling simple, manual and low paid forms of work. Hereby, I argue that they are made up as a bio-medically defined lumpenproletariat.

This paper studies Work Place Health Promotion at two international corporations as an example of an unobtrusive control that targets employees’ lifestyles. It uses Michel Foucault's concepts of neoliberal governmentality and post-disciplinary control to show how Work Place Health Promotion breaks with the disciplinary logic of control most commonly associated with studies of unobtrusive controls in organizations. While discipline is centripetal, correcting employees’ misconduct so that they freely keep within prescribed norms, Work Place Health Promotion is centrifugal, targeting employees’ lifestyles and promoting those existing faculties and inclinations that may increase their activity, performance and their health. It hereby emerges as less restrictive than organizational discipline, but also as more discriminating. For not only does it subject employees’ lifestyles to an economic logic of investment and disinvestment, it also contributes to an exclusion of employees that fail in this regard in the name of their lack of health.

This paper proposes a qualitative study of Work Site Health Promotion (WHP) at the large Swedish producer of trucks and buses, Scania. While the concept of WHP implies that it is employees’ improved health at work that is strived for, we suggest that its main area of intervention is neither the work environment, nor what employees do at work, but employees’ lifestyles. To capture the potential of WHP for the management of organization, we introduce the concept of “neo-paternalistic organizational control.” By this term we want to draw attention to how WHP shares paternalistic approaches’ tendency of disregarding the professional-private divide, while also drawing attention to how this extra-professional control dimension is at once less intrusive and more discriminatory than what is traditionally referred to as paternalism in the literature on managerial control.

This paper analyses literature and studies of work place health promotion. It draws on human capital theory to develop the thesis that over and above its ambition of furthering employees' bio-medical health, work place health promotion seeks to make up employees that are able to self-manage their lifestyles and selves as human capital. As such, the paper suggests, work place health promotion emerges as an important source of authority and power in contemporary working life, which has largely been overlooked by the majority of studies of organisational health. While the ambition to further employees' health is basically positive, the paper suggests that WHP is still a potentially precarious activity because it tends towards subordinating not only work, but also life in general to principles of management and performance.

This paper accounts for health initiatives for employees, competitive sports initiatives for corporate executives, and workability initiatives for functionally disabled individuals. On this basis the paper suggests that health, athletic competitiveness and functional disability have become central markers of employability associated with three bio-politically defined classes. A middle class of individuals that work on their lifestyles and selves to match health and employability ideals; an elite class of individuals that take part in sports activities to prove their 'true' competitive nature; finally, an underclass of individuals that identify with their functional disabilities and make use of them opportunistically as resources for getting employment. The paper furthermore suggests that all three initiatives are expressions of a neoliberal governmentality that cancel out the liberal distinction between an economic world of work and a private and social world by inciting individuals to use their lives in full as human capital.

This article studies the formation and regulation of individual identities among a group of people who after long periods of unemployment are put in a specialized work program for so called ‘occupationally disabled’ individuals. In contrast to its official aim to activate and rehabilitate participants back to the labour market, the study suggests that the work program constitutes the participants as passive and unable to meet the criteria of employability on the labour market. The term ‘occupationally disabled’ emerges not as a medical label referring to already existing, inner characteristic of the individuals concerned, but as an identity that they take on as they pass through the work program. The article contributes to existing research of the formation and regulation of individual identities in organizations in two regards: first, by showing how medicine participates in the formation and regulation of individual identities in organizations, and second, by relating the formation and regulation of individual identities to broader societal issues concerning neoliberal government. Our study suggests that there is a tendency in neo-liberal societies to combine medical and economic expertise into a ‘medico-economic discourse’ within which issues concerning individuals’ activity and agency are transformed into matters of illness and disability. That is, whereas active and self-governing individuals are governed as parts of a high-performing segment of the working population, our study suggests that passive and dependent individuals tend to be governed not just as parts of a low performing segment of the working population, but also as a disabled segment.

In contrast to the largely functionalist and apolitical literature which dominates organisational scholarship on exploitation and exploration after March, this paper seeks to complement this view of exploitation and exploration with a Marxist reading which is unwittingly implied by these terms. More specifically, we combine neo-Marxist and paleo-Marxist arguments to more fully understand the conflictual relations that underpin exploitation and exploration in the management of firms. This enables us to address both the objective and subjective dimensions of exploitation and exploration which firms and workers are involved in through the contemporary capitalist labour process. We illustrate this by drawing on a case study of a large Swedish manufacturing firm which sought to improve lean production by systematically helping employees to explore their own lifestyles and possibilities for a healthier and happier life.

There is a heightened interest in the health of employees among scholars, employers, legislators, and employees themselves. The concern for employees’ health is not a new phenomenon. It has held a central position in political and economic discourses throughout most of the twentieth century. The central argument of this article, however, is that the economic and political changes of the last three decades – the neo-liberal turn – have played a part in altering the very notion of health so that the healthy individual is now a person who not merely passes bio-medical tests, but a person who also leads a particular life and possesses particular skills, namely, those of the active, positive, and self-governing individual. By means of a qualitative study of the sector for occupational health services (OHSs) in Sweden, this article will show how an active lifestyle has become a defining criterion of health. Furthermore, it will describe how health thereby becomes a question of choice and responsibility and how the healthy employee comes across as morally superior to the unhealthy employee. In this connection, this article shows how health experts such as therapists, health coaches, physicians, and so on become important points of authority in the fashioning of the new healthy, active employee