Health Culture : When ideas about wellbeing leads to illness

Health has become increasingly important in the community and has been taken into the labour market to a greater extent. Organizations are trying to keep up with the development of health in the society and working strategically to promote employee health through a variety of fitness activities. The community is contributing to a new vision of the individual where the aesthetic appearance is of growing importance. The employers are trying to keep up with this development and provide an increasing range of fitness activities and from this expect high performing employees. The health promotion today is more about maintaining good looks than previously, where focus was to combat disease. The various health promotion activities are performed on the employee's time off, which means that it will be yet more difficult to distinguish between work and leisure. Not all of the employees will take part in health activities, offered by the company, because of interest, family situation and more. This could lead to that groupings occur to categorize the employees of the "good" and the "bad". One natural question to ask is can this contribute to stress and higher pressure amongst workers? And furthermore can it even cause illness? This study deals with how companies get greater responsibility and interest in employee health and in what way that this is handled. The two main questions analysed are if the concept "health culture" can describe how employees perceive the atmosphere regarding health? And, how do they experience the promoted health activities?To investigate the experiences of a precise phenomenon a qualitative study through interviews has been carried out. The interviews were conducted at one company, with variation by age, gender and occupation. The primary outcome from the results is that employers work with health promotion activities to reduce costs, reduce sick leave and increase efficiency. The experiences of health promotion were mostly positive but it emerged underlying negative sides. In some cases, it was found that the employees experience stress because they do not want or have the time to participate in the activities offered. Finally, the concept of health culture was never seen used before. No other term, describing the same property, was found. It is therefore suggested as a concept to describe what is experienced inside an organization regarding common norms, perception and values of health