Bodies at Work: Insights from Marine and coastaL OSH Research

Abstract

There have been few attempts to bridge the literatures on the social science of the body and the social science of occupational safety and health. Bridging this divide requires a reconciliation of the conflicting treatments of the body found in these literatures - the social body in the literature on the social science of the body and the invisible, taken-for-granted, naturalised or medicalised body in the other. In this paper, we contribute to this neglected area of research by using Bourdieu's concepts of 'habitus', 'field' and 'capital' - as well as Wacquant's concept of 'bodily capital' - to interpret findings from two SafetyNet research projects: a study of perceptions of risk among a sample of male fish harvesters and a study of the quality of life impacts of snow crab occupational allergy and asthma among a sample of primarily female processing workers in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. Our comparative case studies of fish harvesters' and crab processing workers' habitus and bodily capital, and their relevance for how they played the health and safety 'game' in the context of industrial restructuring and asymmetrical power relations, show us how health and safety can be mediated by tensions between embodied competencies and dispositions, and the disruptions caused by changing work environments, limited employment options and, in the case of these particular crab processing workers, illness and disease. Analysing the ways male fish harvesters and female crab processing workers talk about their bodies at work, including how they experience and deal with the risk and reality of injury and occupational disease in fields of asymmetrical power relations, can help us see where the social body fits within the social science of occupational safety and health, and its relevance for occupational safety and health research and policy more generally.