6 The Co-optation of Wellness

Introduction

From its beginnings in the eighteenth century as the paternalistic concern for the health (and therefore productivity) of its workforce, capital has managed to transform the body of the contemporary…worker into the perfect model of self-discipline…in short, one must exude health, energy and vitality. This healthy body must moreover, be obtained by individual effort and achievement. (Holliday and Thompson 2001:123)

The overburdened healthcare system has gained significant attention in recent years, its weaknesses made all the more apparent in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Evidence of its overwhelmed condition is not scarce: the UN projects a shortfall of 18 million health workers by 2030 (“Working for Health and Growth” 2016); physician burnout, which may cost the U.S. healthcare system $4.6 billion a year (Shasha et. al 2019), is suggested by national studies to be experienced by over 50% of physicians (Rahulkumar et. al 2020); and there is a considerable number of hospitals in urban (Williams 2019) and rural areas (Estes 2020) that have had to close due to lack of funding and resources. Overall, traditional healthcare infrastructure is experiencing changes.

People’s relationship to their health and the ways in which they want to actively engage in improving their health are simultaneously changing. This is reflected in the nontraditional services cropping up in healthcare, like the “rapid proliferation of telemedicine, mHealth, retail diagnostic imaging, urgent care clinics, and digitally-driven clinics in retail pharmacies like Walgreens” (Troyanos 2018). The search for convenient ways to manage one’s health has also manifested in the pursuit of health information. A Pew Research Center survey reported that “72% of internet users say they looked online for health information of one kind or another within the past year” (Fox and Duggan 2013).

Now, more than ever, “wellness” is understood to implicate more than physical health. The nonphysical dimensions of wellness, demonstrated in Figure 1.1, are gaining more significance in people’s lives as it becomes understood that these dimensions can impact and inform one another. What does it mean to be “well”? How does one attain “wellness”? These questions are becoming of more substance for the average person, and seeking answers has increasingly gained global attention.

The Global Wellness Institute (GWI) defines wellness as “the active pursuit of activities, choices and lifestyles that lead to a state of holistic health” (“What is Wellness” 2019). This “active pursuit” has led to consumers seeking lifestyle additions to support their evolving sense of wellness. And certainly, a market has surfaced to meet the demands of this proactive consumer base. According to GWI Senior Research Fellow Katherine Johnston, the drive behind this rapidly expanding market is because the “wellness mindset is starting to permeate the global consumer consciousness, affecting people’s daily decision-making” and progressing “from rarely to daily, from episodic to essential, from a luxury to a dominant lifestyle value” (“Wellness Now a $4.2 Trillion Global Industry.” 2018).

As the definition of wellness and the landscape of traditional healthcare shift, consumers are also now able to turn toward a more retail-oriented framework for their picture of “wellness” as opposed to solely relying on the traditional healthcare infrastructure. There is a range of marketplace solutions that attend to consumer interest in wellness, with these solutions being accompanied by robust branding and advertising through social media and influencers. This essay explores the implications of this marketization of wellness in the age of modern capitalism.

For this analysis, “wellness”, “well-being”, and “self-care”—which I shall define as the practice of taking actions to preserve or improve one’s health that is under individual control, deliberate, and self-initiated—will be used interchangeably to reflect popular usage. This essay seeks to analyze three realities of wellness under modern capitalism: (1) the consumerist character of wellness that has emerged as marketplace solutions allow people to seek wellness beyond the traditional healthcare system (2) wellness as a symbol of status that operates as a guiding and stratifying principle of consumer behavior and (3) the utilization of wellness by employers to decreases costs and increase worker productivity. This essay will take up a Weberian analysis of the nature of wellness consumerism as necessitated by the Protestant work ethic and the profit demands of capitalism, as well as the formal rationality of corporations used to promote employee wellness as a means to increase productivity. A Bourdieuan analysis will illuminate how the pursuit of wellness, as associated with consumerist behavior, has also become the opportunity to pursue cultural capital.

Theoretical Framework and Literature Review

Weber’s Protestant Work Ethic

Max Weber’s The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) is one of his most recognized works. It is in this book that Weber attributed the spirit of modern capitalism to the Protestant ethic, whereby “the idea of a duty of the individual toward the increase of his capital, which is assumed as an end in itself,” (Weber 1905:17) is encouraged as opposed to discerning the pursuit of capital as a simple means of satisfying one’s material need.

Worldy (i.e. economic) activity was framed by Protestant, particularly Calvinist, doctrine to be considered as evidence of one’s grace. In this way, the discipline, frugal economic behavior, and consistent work of pursuing economic gain were given a religious or favorable moral character. The religious underpinnings of this ideology have since eroded, yet the drive towards endless work and self-denial remains present under modern capitalism.

The deleterious effects of the constant work mode demanded by capitalism, which is an outgrowth of the Protestant work ethic Weber would argue, are increasingly gaining attention, specifically the concept of “burnout”. WHO describes burnout as an “occupational phenomenon” that results “from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed” and is characterized by feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and reduced professional efficacy” (“Burn-out an ‘occupational phenomenon’” 2019). Burnout has become a common refrain in the workforce across all industries to describe universal experiences of the hard demands of capitalism and endless work on people’s time, energy, and body.

Weber’s Formal Rationality

Rationality in Weber’s work refers to the relationship between ideas and action. He describes four different types of rationality—practical rationality, theoretical rationality, substantive rationality, and formal rationality. Formal rationality involves prioritizing methods based on past experience, observation, logic, or science that will be most effective in attaining a goal. Weber expressed concern that formal rationality would supplant substantive rationality, the latter “refer[ring] to goal-oriented rational action within the context of ultimate ends or values.” (Elwell 2013) Seeing as bureaucratic organizations, both governmental and corporate, operate according to formal rationality, Weber’s prediction that formal rationality would become the dominating rationality under modern capitalism has been realized.

The Culture of Consumption

Sociologist Mike Featherstone (1990) provides three accounts of consumer culture: one that “presents the culture which develops around the accumulation of commodities as leading to greater manipulation and control,” one which frames goods as being “variably used to create distinctions and reinforce social relationships,” and a third that “examines the emotional and aesthetic pleasures, the desires and dreams generated within particular sites of consumption and by consumer culture imagery.” In the development of these accounts, Featherstone seeks to explore the growth of a culture of consumption, rather than simply understanding consumption as an unremarkable, logical by-product of production.

Within the first perspective, the production of consumption, it can be argued that “the accumulation of goods has resulted in the triumph of exchange-value” (Featherstone 1990:6) whereby the “higher purposes and values of culture succumb to the logic of the production process and the market.”

The second perspective, the modes of consumption, takes interest in “the socially structured ways in which goods are used to demarcate social relationships” (Featherstone 1990:7). The consumption of goods may be literal or symbolic; “the symbolic associations of goods may be utilised and renegotiated to emphasise differences in lifestyles which demarcate social relationships” (Featherstone 1990:7). These differences in lifestyles can be emphasized by the day-to-day practice and maintenance of competence related to the consumption and knowledge of goods. Knowledge becomes important in the context of the ever-evolving, constant supply of new, desirable goods because this constant flow requires the ability to adeptly assess new goods’ social and cultural value, and how to use them. This is especially true, Featherstone says, for “aspiring groups who adopt a learning mode towards consumption and the cultivation of a lifestyle” (Featherstone 1990:11).

The third perspective engages with consumption as a matter of consuming dreams, images, and pleasure. This perspective takes interest in the new petit bourgeois notions of leisure that oppose traditional petit-bourgeois conceptualizations of consumption as auxiliary to work and production. The new petit bourgeoisie in this perspective is understood to “have the capacity to broaden and question the prevalent notions of consumption, to circulate images of consumption suggesting alternative pleasures and desires” within the context of a society where there is “increasing salience of the production of symbolic goods, images and information” (Featherwood 1990:14).

Weber’s Status and Bourdieu’s Cultural Capital

Karl Marx asserted that economic capital was the primary determinant of one’s position in the social order; the two social classes of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat are defined by their distinctive relationship to the economic means of production. The bourgeoisie class oversees the process of production, own the means of production, and are the beneficiaries of profits. The proletariat, or working class, are those who are effectively alienated from the means of production, the fruits of their labor, and the profit generated from selling the finished products they produce. However, German sociologist Max Weber developed a theory of stratification that encompassed more than the ownership, or lack, of economic capital. Status confers power to an individual not based on economic capital but based on prestige, honor, and/or popularity in a society. With this conceptualization, class differences are only one dimension of the social structure. According to Weber, status groups are normally communities, in contrast to economic classes. Class is essentially non-social, whereas “status is the outcome of communal social relationships” (Gane 2005:217). Weber (1946[1973]:146) himself describes the differences between the two in the following manner:

With some over-simplification, one might thus say that ‘classes’ are stratified according to their relations to the production and acquisition of goods, whereas ‘status groups’ are stratified according to the principles of their consumption of goods as represented by special ‘styles of life’.

A certain lifestyle and “restrictions on ‘social’ intercourse (that is, intercourse which is not subservient to economic or any other of business’s “functional” purposes)” (Weber “Class, Status, Power”) can be expected of those part of a status group.

Similar to Weber, French sociologist Bourdieu’s theory of capital and class stratification expanded the understanding of social positioning through his development of the concepts of cultural, social, and symbolic capital. He extended the sense of “capital” from a purely economic one by “employing it in a wider system of exchanges whereby assets of different kinds are transformed and exchanged within complex networks or circuits within and across different fields.” (Grenfell 2014:99) These capital forms are immaterial, but like economic capital, they shape social organization and can be acquired, exchanged, and converted into other forms of capital. The particular type of noneconomic capital of interest for this analysis is cultural capital. Cultural capital entails “a form of value associated with culturally authorized tastes, consumption patterns, attributes, skills, and awards.” (Webb, Schirato, and Danaher 2002:x) Embodied cultural capital refers to the incorporation of certain attitudes and practices into an individual.

Wellness Consumerism and Corporate Wellness

Wellness Industry

The wellness industry has experienced explosive growth in recent years. That the Global Wellness Institute (GWI) should even exist as the leading source for authoritative wellness industry research indicates the strength of the wellness market.

According to a 2018 research report by GWI, the global wellness industry grew from a $3.7 trillion market in 2015 to $4.2 trillion in 2017, an increase of 12.8% in two years. The global wellness economy that the GWI analyzes encompasses various markets: Personal Care, Beauty, & Anti-Aging; Healthy Eating, Nutrition, & Weight Loss; Wellness Tourism; Fitness & Mind-Body; Preventive & Personalized Medicine and Public Health; Traditional & Complementary Medicine; Spa Economy; Thermal/Mineral Springs; and Workplace Wellness. Senior Research Fellow Ophelia Yeung at GWI states that future years will only see more growth for the wellness industry, with the three sectors of wellness real estate, workplace wellness, and wellness tourism having the highest projected average annual growth rate at 8.0%, 6.7%, and 7.5% respectively between 2017-2022 (Yeung and Johnston 2018).

As demonstrated by the various wellness categories that GWI researches, the wellness marketplace is varied in its offerings: yoga retreats, fitness tracker smartwatches, digital apps like the meditation app Headspace, boutique fitness studios, and so on. As will be detailed in the next section, the commodification of wellness is being aided by the increased use of “wellness” labels and by advertising efforts that capitalize on notions of “self-care”.

Self-Care Marketing

In 2020, Google searches for “self-care” have increased by 250% since 2015, not including other related queries like “what is self-care,” “self-care bingo,” and “self-care ideas.” Such a Google search for “self-care” produces numerous articles detailing self-care rituals and self-care “must-haves.” It is by providing these “must-have” products and services that companies have firmly inserted themselves into the discourse of self-care and wellness.

“Self-care” has entered and cemented itself into the corporate marketing lexicon. Within the consumerist framework, self-care and wellness are fashioned into chocolate or skincare purchases; the terms have effectively been incorporated into business strategies as a way to promote consumerism. This encouragement of consumerism is packaged and advertised as support of consumer’s concern for products that attend to their overall sense of wellness. Using language associated with self-care, wellness, and self-improvement allows companies to construct narratives that present brands as inspiring, celebrating, and motivating their consumers as people who deserve good things (that the brands can provide).

This language may take the form of the pithy “treat yo’ self” affirmation that many companies have used to both demonstrate their pop culture savoir-faire (the phrase itself came from a popular sitcom television show Parks and Recreation) and that they support their consumers indulging in self-care purchases. Companies have also used the “#selfcaresunday” hashtag on social media platforms to promote their products as fitting into their consumers’ wellness practices. Tribe Dynamics, an influencer marketing platform provider, detected that the hashtag “#selfcaresunday” is driving an increase in earned media value (a measure of the comments and likes about a brand on third-party social media content) for the top 50 skincare brands. In the first ten months of 2019, these top 50 brands’ total earned media value associated with this particular hashtag was 81% higher than for all of 2018 (Manoff 2020). Additionally, there are labels or signifiers increasingly being used to denote wellness, conferring a “better-for-you” (BFY) status to products like trendy superfoods and skincare products. According to a report titled “For Major Food and Beverage Companies, Healthier Products Yield Healthier Profits,” issued by Hudson Institute, companies that sell BFY products “record stronger sales growth, higher operating profits, superior shareholder returns, and better company reputations than companies that sell fewer BFY products.” In the realm of skincare and beauty, “skin-care labels that positioned themselves as natural grew 14 percent year-over-year in 2019, while clean brands jumped 39 percent, said Larissa Jensen, beauty analyst at the NPD Group, a market research firm” (ElBoghdady 2020). The rise of “clean beauty,” “conscious beauty,” and “superfood” labeling is firmly in the domain of marketing and demonstrates that industries are tuning into consumer interests and concern about various dimensions of wellness.

The formation of a market and consumption patterns around wellness and self-care has been confirmed by research consultant of Consumer Insights Amrutha Shridhar at Euromonitor International, the world’s most prominent independent provider of market research. Shridhar unveiled a new consumer type in the report generated from Euromonitor International’s global lifestyle survey: the “self-care aficionado.” In describing the proclivities of the self-care aficionado, tactics given to best target this consumer type are the “promotion of products that facilitate time spent with immediate family and close friends; prioritising products that enhance personal well-being including physical exercise, mental health and self-care; marketing products and services in collaboration with travel and cultural experiences” (Shridhar 2020). It is understood that marketing strategies for products in the wellness industry to self-care aficionados must be developed around the multidimensional sense of wellness that consumers are seeking.

Corporate Wellness

Workplace wellness programs “refer to a coordinated and comprehensive set of strategies which include programs, policies, benefits, environmental supports, and links to the surrounding community designed to meet the health and safety needs of all employees” (“Workplace Health Model” 2019). Examples include health education classes, policies that promote healthy behaviors such as a smoke-free campus, employee health insurance coverage for preventative screenings, access to local fitness facilities, implementing behavioral health services, and so forth.

An increasing number of employers are budgeting an increasing amount of money for workplace wellness programs. A report by The Rand Corporation and sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services found that “approximately half of U.S. employers offer wellness promotion initiatives, and larger employers are more likely to have more complex wellness programs” (Mattke et al. 2013). Optum, a health services technology firm, published its 10th annual survey of more than 500 U.S.-based employers in August 2019. This report demonstrated that compared to a decade ago (34%), more than twice of employers expected to increase their investment into workplace wellness programs as part of their employee benefits mix (84%) (Serxner, Kichlu, and Ratelis 2019:18).

Projected outcomes of increased recruitment, retention, morale, and productivity are important to employees seeking to implement such programs (Serxner et al 2019:19). Incorporating wellness programs into the workplace has also garnered interest from companies due to the expectation of decreased health care costs. According to the CDC, “[a] systematic review of 56 published studies of worksite health programs showed that well-implemented workplace health programs can lead to 25% savings each on absenteeism, health care costs, and workers’ compensation and disability management claims costs” (“Control Health Care Costs” 2019). Data has shown that the return on investment for comprehensive, well-constructed employee wellness programs can be as high as 6 to 1 (Berry, Mirabito, Baun 2012).

In a press release for the 10th annual Health and Well-Being Survey from Fidelity Investments and the National Business Group on Health, it was acknowledged that encouraging interconnected well-being programs beyond physical health was important because, as stated by President and CEO of National Business Group on Health Brian Marcotte, “[m]ore employers view their investments in health and well-being as integral to deploying the most engaged, productive and competitive workforce possible” (Shamrell 2019).

Analysis

The Protestant work ethic has created the conditions (i.e. capitalism) necessitating this particular emphasis on “self-care” and “wellness”.

The tireless work necessitated by capitalistic conditions that impact people’s minds, body, energy, and time has lent itself to the more holistic picture of wellness gaining purchase. No longer is simply being physically healthy enough. People are searching for self-mediated methods of gaining control over their lives and well-being, in opposition to the constraints and burdens that come with work.

The phenomenon of burnout is too often considered as being constrained within the work sphere, i.e. how it affects worker productivity and company culture. However, the ways in which work-life consistently blends into private life makes burnout of consequence to someone’s well-being outside the context of their employment. As a particular consequence of the tireless work ethic imbued by the Protestant work ethic, burnout’s association with feelings of energy exhaustion and depletion have bearing on the energy that an individual does or doesn’t have when they officially complete their work for the day. Seeking to insulate or replenish themselves from the energy depletion of work, people can find wellness solutions to provide a variety of products and experiences that are meant to accommodate the need to take care of oneself in the face of the endless demands of work. Even the “#selfcaresunday” phrase, well used as a marketing tactic for wellness products, can be understood as arising out of a need for refuge from work.

An understanding of wellness as more than physical is important in the face of the Protestant work ethic that has birthed the conditions under capitalism that deplete people’s energy, time, and bodies. This understanding of the varied aspects of wellness is relevant not only as a way of framing the varied, negative impact of tireless work on individuals but also as a way to understand the diverse wellness marketplace solutions that are being offered.

Workplace wellness programs fulfill corporate bureaucratic formal rationality.

Corporate imperatives include sustaining a productive and efficient workforce that can create profit. Poor health can impact worker productivity in a myriad of ways—from missed days at work due to illness to poor financial health correlating to employees being “less likely to be physically healthy and more likely to report feeling frequently stressed or anxious,” lending itself to negative impacts on job performance and productivity (Shamrell 2019). Conversely, healthier employees are more productive. For example, there exists less absenteeism due to illness and “[b]ecause employee health frequently carries over into better health behavior that impacts both the employee and their family (such as nutritious meals cooked at home or increased physical activity with the family), employees may miss less work caring for ill family members as well” (“Increase Productivity” 2019).

As a way of better ensuring healthy employees—and thereby ensuring a healthy workforce with decreased absenteeism, healthcare costs, and presenteeism—promoting and investing in employee wellness fits into the broader functioning of bureaucratic formal rationality. Elements of formal rationality—impersonal quantitative calculation, efficiency, predictability—are apparent in the reasons that employers state for increasing workplace wellness program budgets and how they go about developing these programs. The impact of workplace wellness programs by the metrics corporations are interested in is quantifiable; “the cost savings of providing a workplace health program can be measured against absenteeism among employees, reduced overtime to cover absent employees, and costs to train replacement employees” (“Increase Productivity” 2019). This ability to calculate how employee wellness translates to reduced costs for the company guides how an organization decides what specific services they want to implement in their workplace wellness program. The utility of corporate wellness services is demonstrated by a decrease in absenteeism or by a decrease in presenteeism. Such utility is measured impersonally, with attention favoring the output of the collective workforce rather than to the utility of services to specific individuals.

The corporate interest in wellness programs is a matter of formal rationality’s means-to-end calculations. The end goal of increased worker productivity and decreased costs is supported by implementing wellness programs. As such, these programs are meant to contribute to support an efficient, productive workforce.

“Self-Care” and “wellness” have adopted a status dimension within the culture of consumption.

Wellness consumption is a pattern of consumption behaviors that can be understood as contributing to defining a status group. With the cultivation of a preference and taste for products and services marketed with self-improvement, wellness, better-for-you language, there emerges a stratification based on the principles of consuming wellness. Though it could be argued that consumerism’s increased association with self-care and wellness is a matter of using economic capital as a way to pursue and assert health, moreover, there exists the importance that this use of economic capital is being organized around a particular principle of consumption that prioritizes wellness, self-care, and self-improvement. It is in this organization of consumption patterns that a status group is created and defined by its interest in wellness.

Marketing and advertising have contributed to wellness adopting a dimension of status. “Health experts” and social media influencers will appear in adverts or on their social media platform discussing wellness and self-care with casual product placements, direct product promotions, and use of hashtags like “#selfcaresunday.” Having specific wellness products be promoted by individuals whose popular platforms center wellness is meant to lend credibility to the product brands in the minds of consumers, largely because these products are incorporated into the sphere of influence that individual had because of their platform and audience. That is to say, the status of these individuals can give status to the products that they promote.

In effect, social media has contributed to packaging the concept of wellness into a commodifiable good that can be marketed and sold. As stated by David Pring-Mill (Spector 2020), a consultant who has authored articles about marketing for business trade publications:

“Once a particular term like ‘self-care’ gains online traction or outpaces a similar term, the content creators who believe in ‘keyword stuffing’ will predictably weave that attractive term into their content, even in places where it doesn’t belong, Marketers will try to capitalize on the trend. The digital economy is partly responsible for mass anxiety, and now that same economy is more than willing to propose cures to the masses, in hyper-targeted ways, based on past user interactions with content and hashtags.”

The wellness experiences that GWI has projected to see the highest rate of growth within the wellness industry in years to come—wellness real estate, workplace wellness, and wellness tourism—are also worthy of consideration. No longer is it just physical goods that can denote wellness, wellness experiences have developed their own nice in the marketplace. These wellness experiences go beyond cost; there is sustained participation, dedication, and commitment necessary to go on a retreat or invest in wellness real estate. As these are wellness experiences, not simply products, there is the opportunity for the cultural capital of knowing and interacting with the culturally authorized tastes and consumption patterns of the newest up-and-coming wellness trend to be embodied. This embodied form of cultural capital further informs an individual’s preferences for experiences and products that they understand to be aligned with the wellness products, services, and experiences that have encountered before and are familiar with.

Featherstone’s account of the second perspective of consumer culture (the modes of consumption) finds purchase in the linguistic symbolism of “wellness,” “better for you,” and similar signifiers in wellness consumptions. Placing importance on these signifiers emphasizes lifestyle differences between those who have the know-how of what new, trending wellness products are emerging and those who do not have a similar pulse of the wellness industry and/or cannot afford to purchase said wellness products or experiences. Cultivating a wellness lifestyle within this culture of consumerism, therefore, requires familiarity in assessing the cultural value of various wellness goods.

Conclusion

The multidimensionality of wellness is fastening itself into the public mind, as is the variety of products, services, and experiences offered to promote and enhance one’s wellness. The expansion of the wellness industry into a multitrillion-dollar economy has offered opportunities for individuals to actively participate in their wellness in self-mediated ways beyond the traditional healthcare system.

The emphasis and marketization of wellness is likewise multidimensional. Constructing a holistic picture of wellness becomes necessary within the restrictive and exhaustive demands of work under capitalism. The Protestant work ethic that has imbued capitalism with a desire for avarice has burdened most with tireless work, affecting not only one’s physical health but other dimensions of health like emotional or social. As such, a holistic sense of wellness can be applied to understanding and address the ways in which one’s well-being is adversely affected.

There is a wide assortment of marketplace solutions to aid one’s interest in attending to their wellness. The marketization of wellness is contributing to the consumerist character permeating wellness. The proliferation of products, services, and experiences are offering people the chance to take a sense of control over how they want to pursue wellness, but companies are tuning into the wellness concerns of individuals to present the consumption of wellness goods as a primary way to pursue wellness. The use of “self-care” marketing, wielded by social media influencers and “health experts” with prominent social platforms, taps into the desire of individuals to take care of themselves, but via indulging in product purchases.

Parallel to how companies pursue wellness for the benefit of increased purchases of their goods, corporate wellness also serves an end. In accordance with formal rationality, promoting employee wellness serves to ensure an efficient workforce that can produce profit. The investment in workplace wellness programs is directed by principles of impersonal quantitative calculation, efficiency, and predictability.

Wellness consumption becomes a way to demarcate a status group when consumption patterns become organized specifically around promoting and ensuring “wellness.” The consumption of wellness is part and parcel of a wellness lifestyle, shared by those in the status group. The symbolism of wellness language like “self-care,” “better for you,” “all-natural” holds significance to those part of the status group as a way to define their shared preferences and tastes in contrast to those who don’t share the same interest or knowledge of the cultural value of wellness products.

This brief analysis can certainly be further explored. Contributions can be further made regarding the gendered aspects of wellness, particularly the marketing of wellness. The promotion of self-care and wellness as it relates to the body and as a matter of “treating yourself” should be further explored as a manifestation in which the female body is regulated in society and how the onus of this regulation lands on the shoulders of women. Further investigating the dynamic between the economic and cultural capital of constructing a wellness status group and wellness lifestyle would also be appropriate. This seems to hold particularly true if one considers how there are already economic barriers to the traditional healthcare system. How does one navigate the economic and cultural capital barriers to traditional healthcare and the wellness industry?

Let this essay end with the acknowledgment that there exist conceptualizations of self-care that exist outside of consumerist consumption of spa experiences, the newest superfood, or 100% plant-derived skincare product. Black feminist scholar Audre Lorde (1988) stated, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” To this iteration of self-care, we must investigate how the approach to “self-care” shifts, evolves, and devolves in different contexts.

References

Berry, Leonard L., Ann M. Mirabito, and William B. Baun. 2010. “What’s the Hard Return on Employee Wellness Programs?” Harvard Business Review 88(12):104–12, 142.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2019a. “Increase Productivity.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Retrieved December 8, 2020 (https://www.cdc.gov/workplacehealthpromotion/model/control-costs/benefits/productivity.html).

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2019b. “Workplace Health Model.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Retrieved December 8, 2020 (https://www.cdc.gov/workplacehealthpromotion/model/index.html).

“Control Health Care Costs.” 2019. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (https://www.cdc.gov/workplacehealthpromotion/model/control-costs/index.html)

ElBoghdady, Dina. 2020. “‘Clean’ Beauty Has Taken over the Cosmetics Industry, but That’s about All Anyone Agrees on.” Washington Post (Washington, D.C.: 1974), March 9.

Elwell, Frank W. 2013. Sociocultural Systems: Principles of Structure and Change. Edmonton, AB, Canada: AU Press.

Estes, Clary. 2020. “1 in 4 Rural Hospitals Are at Risk of Closure and the Problem Is Getting Worse.” Forbes Magazine, February 24.

Featherstone, Mike. 1990. “Perspectives on Consumer Culture.” Sociology 24(1):5–22.

Fox, Susannah, and Maeve Duggan. 2013. “Health Online 2013.” Pewresearch.Org. Retrieved December 6, 2020 (https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2013/01/15/health-online-2013/).

Gane, Nicholas. 2005. “Max Weber as Social Theorist.” European Journal of Social Theory 8(2):211–26.

Grenfell, Michael. 2014. Pierre Bourdieu: Key Concepts. London, England: Routledge.

Han, Shasha, Tait D. Shanafelt, Christine A. Sinsky, Karim M. Awad, Liselotte N. Dyrbye, Lynne C. Fiscus, Mickey Trockel, and Joel Goh. 2019. “Estimating the Attributable Cost of Physician Burnout in the United States.” Annals of Internal Medicine 170(11):784–90.

High-Level Commission on Health Employment and Economic Growth. 2016. Working for Health and Growth: Investing in the Health Workforce.

Holliday, Dr Ruth, Professor John Hassard, and Dr Jon Binnie, eds. 2001. Contested Bodies. Taylor & Francis Group.

Lorde, Audre. 1988. A Burst of Light. Middlesex, UK: Sheba Feminist Press.

Manoff, Jill. 2020. “The Rise of #SelfcareSunday.” Glossy.Co. Retrieved December 8, 2020 (https://www.glossy.co/beauty/the-rise-of-selfcaresunday/).

Mattke, Soeren, Hangsheng Liu, John P. Caloyeras, Christina Y. Huan, Kristin R. Van Busum, Dmitry Khodyakov, and Victoria Shier. 2013. Workplace Wellness Programs Study.

Serxner, Seth, Rohit Kichlu, and Erin Ratelis. 2019. Ten Years of Health and Well-Being at Work: Learning from Our Past and Reimagining the Future. Optum.

Shamrell, Mike. 2019. “AS THE SCOPE OF CORPORATE WELL-BEING PROGRAMS CONTINUES TO EXPAND, LARGE EMPLOYERS EXPECTED TO SPEND AN AVERAGE OF $3.6 MILLION IN 2019.”

Shridhar, Amrutha. 2020. Understanding the Path to Purchase: 2020 Consumer Types.

Singh, Rahulkumar, Keith Volner, and Dan Marlowe. 2020. “Provider Burnout.” in StatPearls. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing.

Spector, Nicole. 2020. “What Is Self-Care? How to Cut through the Marketing Noise and Actually Practice It.” NBC News. Retrieved December 8, 2020 (https://www.nbcnews.com/better/lifestyle/what-self-care-how-cut-through-marketing-noise-actually-practice-ncna1134921).

Troyanos, Kevin. 2018. “What the ‘Healthcare Consumerism’ Movement Means for Health and Wellness Marketers.” Sswanalytics.Com. Retrieved December 6, 2020 (https://sswanalytics.com/2018/09/20/what-the-healthcare-consumerism-movement-means-for-health-and-wellness-marketers/).

Webb, Jenn, Tony Schirato, and Geoff Danaher. 2002. Understanding Bourdieu. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.

Weber, Max. [1946]1973. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Weber, Max. [1905] 2005. The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York, NY: Routledge Member of the Taylor and Francis Group.

“Wellness Now a $4.2 Trillion Global Industry.” 2018. Global Wellness Institute. Retrieved December 6, 2020 (https://globalwellnessinstitute.org/press-room/press-releases/wellness-now-a-4-2-trillion-global-industry/).

“What Is Wellness?” 2019. Global Wellness Institute. Retrieved December 6, 2020 (https://globalwellnessinstitute.org/what-is-wellness/).

Williams, Joseph P. 2019. “Code Red: The Grim State of Urban Hospitals.” US News. Retrieved (https://www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-communities/articles/2019-07-10/poor-minorities-bear-the-brunt-as-urban-hospitals-close).

World Health Organization. 2019. “Burn-out an ‘Occupational Phenomenon’: International Classification of Diseases.” World Heath Organization. Retrieved November 16, 2020 (https://www.who.int/news/item/28-05-2019-burn-out-an-occupational-phenomenon-international-classification-of-diseases).

Yeung, Ophelia, and Katherine Johnston. 2018. Global Wellness Economy Monitor.