Physical exercise has grown to be a common leisure activity in Sweden, a broad cultural phenomenon of our time, and has even become a moral imperative for the good citizen. In Swedish labour legislation, workplace health promotion is also sanctioned. In many workplaces, this includes joint participation in recreational sports races of various kinds and distances, which constitutes a norm of sporty employees, and sports as work culture and work ethics. Despite good intentions, health promotion interventions can become tools for discipline and control of the employees.
The overall purpose of our project is to investigate, through ethnographic methods and cultural analysis perspectives, the consequences of demanding forms of sports and recreational races as health and wellness promotion activities at work. How do these activities affect workplace culture, the staff as a collective, and employees as individuals? In the project, we analyse processes of inclusion and exclusion in relation to these sports activities: What norms, conditions and prerequisites surround them? How do the activities impact the concepts of, and division between, work and leisure?
This is a qualitative project, based on ethnological methods and cultural theoretical approaches, combined with discourse theory and critical perspectives of power. The ethnographic fieldwork will be carried out at four carefully selected workplaces, that engage in serious recreational sports as joint health and wellness promotion activities.
