Managing population at the end of the 1980s : the construction of health promotion and disease prevention as an expression of a neoliberal rationality : a critical discourse analysis of White Paper no. 41, 1987-88 Health Policy Toward the Year 2000. National Health Plan

The “neoliberal turn” that has played out since the last decades of the twentieth century has received much scholarly attention in terms of the ways in which neoliberalism – seen as a set of economic policies – has negatively impacted health. Less attention has been given to the ways in which the new social policies of prevention and health promotion, that were elaborated in the same period, can be understood as a part of the shift, as well as the empirical study of the particular ways in which the neoliberal rationality of population management is expressed in the concrete social policies themselves. Part I of the thesis aims to demonstrate the importance of conceiving of public health not only in terms of how the economic policies responsible for “releasing market forces” has led to negative impacts on public health, but also as a central social policy in the construction of the conditions of possibility for the competitive market economy itself; as well as the relevance of such an approach to the study of social policies of prevention and health promotion in Norway during the 1980s, a country which is generally perceived to be “social democratic,” rather than “neoliberal.” Part II presents the findings from a critical discourse analysis of “Health Policy Toward the Year 2000. National Health Plan,” a White Paper published by the Department of Social Affairs under Labor at the end of the 1980s. The text is analyzed within a governmentality-framework and from the question: how is public health discursively constructed in the text? Part III discusses how a neoliberal rationality can be seen expressed in the discursive construction of “public health” found in this social policy