The Happiness Industry (15 page)

When he did share the insight with his professor – namely that sick people look sick – he received the sarcastic reply that, indeed, ‘if a man is fat, he looks fat'. But Selye refused to abandon his insight. As a child he had accompanied his father, one of a long line of doctors in the Selye family, on his visits to poor households in Vienna, and had a strong vocation towards a traditional, somewhat holistic, understanding of the healing process.
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As the medical ‘psychotherapists' had realized, the doctor's personal interaction with the patient was a crucial ingredient in how they responded to treatment.

The history of utilitarianism is littered with dashed hopes that there might be a single measure of human optimization which could serve as the instrument through which all public and private decisions might be taken. This ideal rests on the hope that the ambiguity and plurality of human culture might be overcome through knowledge of a single quantifiable entity. Whether it is via the idea of utility, energy, value or emotion, the project of monism always involves this form of simplification. In his apparently banal observation that ill people look ill, Selye had hit on another version of this. It took him another ten years before he had developed this into a scientific theory, which he termed ‘General Adaptation Syndrome'.

The novelty of this idea, from the perspective of medicine, was that the syndrome Selye was describing was non-specific: it had a common set of symptoms, but these were not tied firmly to any particular causes or disorders. He explored this doing various experiments on animals, plunging them into cold water, cutting them, implanting poisons into them, to see how quite disparate forms of brutality could prompt the identical modes of biological response.

Like any biological system, an animal body experiences various external stimuli, intrusions and demands which it has to respond to. What Selye was interested in was the nature of this response, which could sometimes become a problem in its own right. Biological systems which are overstimulated start to shut down; the same also happens when they are under-stimulated. The health of any organism depends on an optimal level of activity, not too much, not too little. Humans were no different, as far as Selye was concerned. The patients who simply ‘looked ill' in his medical class that day were all displaying a common form of physical reaction to a very diverse set of illnesses. A monistic theory of general wellness was emerging.

Until the 1940s, the term ‘stress' was used principally in reference to metals and was virtually unknown outside the worlds of engineering and physics. An iron bar becomes ‘stressed' when it is unable to cope with the demands that are placed on it. Selye recognized that what engineers saw as ‘wear and tear' in, say, a bridge, was the same problem as what he had termed ‘General Adaptation Syndrome' in the human body. General Adaptation Syndrome was effectively an indicator of the ‘rate of wear and tear in the body'.
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In the aftermath of World War Two, he re-christened the syndrome as ‘stress'. By the 1950s, this was a distinctive new field of medical and biological research.

Like Mayo, Selye never saw himself as an academic only: he was on a mission. According to his holistic understanding of illness, entire societies and cultures could become sick if they lost the capacity to cope with external stimuli and demands. Equally, they could slump into passive inactivity if they were never stimulated sufficiently. As he grew older, Selye developed this idea into something approaching an ethical philosophy, though a frighteningly egocentric one. A healthy society, he argued, is built around ‘egoistic altruism', in which every individual sets about doing his utmost to win the adoration of others. This produces a form of natural equilibrium, in which the egotist becomes integral to his own social system:

No one will make personal enemies if his egotism, his compulsive hoarding of valuables, manifest itself only by inciting live, goodwill, gratitude, respect, and all other positive feelings that render him useful and often indispensable to his neighbours.
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Despite his aspiration to offer a science capable of diagnosing every social problem, Selye stuck firmly to biology when it came to seeking explanations. His characteristically monistic assumption was that any society or organization was merely a larger, more complex biological system, whose behaviour could be reduced back to the actions of organisms and cells.

Away from Selye's own biological research, and his macho libertarian politics, the non-specific nature of stress represented an opportunity which would eventually permeate into the world of management. Stress, as Selye had argued, is simply a particular type of reaction to any excessive demand. This was equally amenable to psychological or organizational forms of
exploration. In fact, without using the term ‘stress', the US military had become aware of the same syndrome during World War Two, in the common forms of psychological collapse experienced by soldiers who had spent too long in battle. The stressful demands placed on a human being are not merely physical, but social and psychological too. What went on between the demand and the response was open to a range of different scientific explanations beyond merely biological ones. The study of stress became an expressly interdisciplinary field.

As the study of how humans cope with physical and mental demands, it also lent itself perfectly to the study of work. By definition, stress is something we encounter without having chosen to, but cannot avoid. It often occurs when we are trapped in a certain situation, simply forced to react to it. The field of occupational health emerged during the 1960s to understand precisely how work impacts upon us, physically and mentally. Studying how different types of job demand produce different hormonal and emotional responses yielded a number of potentially transformative findings. It wasn't simply that excessive demands were bad for people; insufficient workplace demands – or boredom – could also be unhealthy, as Selye had recognized. Our current concern with unemployment as a potential health risk is one manifestation of the latter anxiety.

Just as Mayo's emphasis on dialogue created an opening for a more thoroughly egalitarian critique of business hierarchy, the study of stress in the workplace achieved something similar for a while. Work carried out by the psychologist Robert Kahn and his colleagues at the University of Michigan during the early 1960s highlighted the various ways in which power structures and work design impact upon the health of employees.
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Badly designed jobs and lack of proper recognition in the workplace
were clear contributors to physical and mental ill-health. Lack of any influence over where and when one carries out a task is a stress factor, which takes its toll on both mind and body. A number of clear routes, between the injustices of hierarchical business and the vulnerabilities of the human body, were becoming apparent. One of the most important of these was the discovery that stress leads to the cortisol hormone being released into the bloodstream, hardening the arteries and increasing the risk of heart attack.
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Despite the high-profile obsession with executive burn-out, this form of stress is far more common for those lacking power or status at work.

By the 1980s, the non-specific syndrome that Selye had first identified in his lecture hall in 1925 had become one of the most pressing problems confronting managers in the Western world. Workers were no longer reporting straight-forward physical fatigue of the sort that Frederick Taylor might have understood; nor were they simply unhappy in a way that Elton Mayo might have recognized. They were now exhibiting a generalized deflation of activity, a form of psychosomatic collapse that we have come to identify with the concept of stress. In the UK, stress overtook repetitive strain injury in 2012 as the leading cause of absence from work. This is not easily classified as either a physical illness or a mental illness. What prompts it may include work but may equally include other types of social, psychological or physical demands that the individual simply can't cope with.

The science of stress was of the utmost importance for managers worrying about the depletion of their workforce. It became one of the main preoccupations of the human resources profession, who sought out rudimentary wisdom on a wide panoply of ‘bio-psycho-social' complaints. The sheer breadth of contributory factors to stress – some tangible, others intangible – made it
extremely difficult to achieve any control over it. This is in addition to the graver psychosomatic risks faced by those in precarious jobs, who move in and out of work, without even managers to support them from one month to the next. One conclusion to draw from this would be, as per the occupational health studies of the 1960s, that the fundamental politics of work had grown dysfunctional and needed a more wholesale transformation, and not simply piecemeal medical treatment. But would this be the lesson that was learnt?

Taylor's revenge

When the young woman in the Hawthorne plant informed Elton Mayo in 1928 that she was hoping to visit Norway for a wedding, this would have represented an unusual level of intimacy, had Mayo been her boss. In the early twenty-first century, managers in large corporations pursue a very different form of intimacy with their employees.

Consider Unilever, the global manufacturer of food, beauty products and cleaning products. In 2001, its senior management demanded a programme to help them personally manage their own energy levels, as they feared the consequences of executive working lifestyles.
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Being in the industry they were in, there was ample expertise to help them design this. The ‘Lamplighter' health and well-being programme (named ‘Ignite U' in Australia) was the result, tailor-made to help senior management keep up their performance levels and offset the risk of stress. The business benefits for Lamplighter quickly became clear, with evaluations suggesting that every £1 spent on the programme yielded £3.73 in return. It was quickly rolled out across dozens
of Unilever offices around the world before being extended to cover the rest of the workforce.

Programmes such as Lamplighter are becoming more and more common. They seek to identify a wide range of health and well-being risks in their workforce, including the sporting activities of employees and their ‘mental resilience'. Lamplighter requires Unilever employees to be formally (albeit, confidentially) assessed in terms of a range of ‘behaviours', relating to nutrition, smoking and drinking, exercise and personal stress. The state-of-the-art workplace of today has taken on features of the doctor's surgery, just as the doctor has been required to take on skills of the motivational manager. What are referred to as ‘Health 2.0' technologies for the digital monitoring of well-being are often indistinguishable from productivity enhancements. The iPhone 6's Health app, launched in September 2014, was celebrated as another example of Apple's reimagining of our everyday lives, without much pause to think who it had really been designed for. Needless to say, employers, health insurers and wellness service providers are amongst the main enthusiasts for the phone's constant measurement of bodily behaviour.

Many ‘best practice' employers now offer free gym membership to their most valued staff, and even free counselling. Business services, such as Virgin Pulse (a telling name, seeing as pulse rate represents life in its most quantifiable form), offer an integrated suite of psychosomatic programmes aimed at optimizing their physical energy, their attention span and their ‘true motivations', through extensive digital surveillance and coaching. As the physical and the psychological character of work – and of illness – start to blend into each other, notions of ‘health', ‘happiness' and ‘productivity' become ever harder to distinguish from each other. Employers end up treating all three things as a single
entity, to be maximized via a range of stimuli and instruments. This is the monistic philosophy of the twenty-first century manager: each worker can become better, in body, mind and output.

The political hope that perhaps the human benefits of dialogue and workplace empowerment might be more thoroughly recognized turns into disappointment, as performance management and health care are fused into a science of well-being optimization. And yet there are radical political economists for whom the de-materialization of contemporary work represents an opportunity for a whole new industrial model.
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The shift towards a ‘knowledge-based' economy, in which ideas and relationships are key sources of business value, could be the basis of entirely new workplace structures in which power is decentralized and decisions taken collaboratively. There are good reasons to suspect that such models might produce fewer psychosomatic stresses; in that sense, they may be more efficient than the status quo. If dialogue in the workplace is a necessary factor for productivity – as Mayo recognized – why not grant it some real influence over how decisions get made, right up to the highest level? Rather than ironic management speak, which twists words to manipulate emotions in the expectation that this will yield greater output, a more honest reflection on the problems of occupational ill-health would question the hoarding of status and reward by a small number of senior managers. Instead, traditional forms of management and hierarchy are rescued by the new ubiquity of digital surveillance, which allows informal behaviour and communication to be tracked, analysed and managed.

Rather than the rise of alternative corporate forms, we are now witnessing the discreet return of the ‘scientific management' style of Frederick Winslow Taylor, only now with even greater
scientific scrutiny of bodies, movement and performance. The front line in worker performance evaluation has shifted into bodily-monitoring devices, heart-rate monitoring, and sharing of real-time health data, for analysis of stress risks. Strange to say, the notion of what represents a ‘good' worker has gone full circle since the 1870s, from the origins of ergonomic fatigue studies, through psychology, psychosomatic medicine and back to the body once more. Perhaps the managerial cult of optimization just needs something tangible to cling onto.