Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on archival research to explore the transformation of understandings of occupational health and unwellness in the context of very-large-scale epidemiological studies among British civil service workers and their officeplace environments.

Paper long abstract:

Beginning in the 1960s and continuing to the present day, a series of very-large-scale epidemiological studies conducted amongst civil servants in Britain and elsewhere transformed medical conceptions of clerical labor and its environments as sites of occupational health and toxicity. Focusing especially on the British case, this paper will combine medical and economic anthropology in order to understand these transformations as they trafficked across the porous boundaries between medicine, politics, the economy, and social life. It will track the circulation and interaction of three sociomedical concepts as these accrued multiple meanings in the course of their development: “the social gradient”; “stress”; and “the work-home interface.” In doing so, the paper argues that civil servant epidemiological subjects served for the British political and medical establishment as a site of value extraction twice over: first as workers charged with the orderly and efficient dispensation of human government, and second as a substrate for the experimental formulation of new theories of wellness and its opposites. The paper will place its archival findings within a global context to suggest a new way of understanding the work of capitalism: through the physical embodiment of the toxicities of what I call "conditional labor."