The power of play and community – managing exercise at work by combining institutional logics

• Date: 19 November 2024
• Pages: 25-41
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/IJWHM-03-2023-0044
• Published date: 19 November 2024
• Subject Matter: Health & social care,Healthcare management,HR & organizational behaviour,Human resource policy,Employee welfare
• Author: Ulrik Wagner,Ly Lykke Møller

The power of play and community –

managing exercise at work by

combining institutional logics

Ulrik Wagner

Department of Nutrition, Exercise and Sports, NEXS, University of Copenhagen,

Copenhagen, Denmark, and

Ly Lykke Møller

National Research Centre for the Working Environment, Copenhagen, Denmark

Abstract

Purpose –Play and exercise at the workplace have been promoted as ways to counter the development of

lacking physical activity and improve workplace health. Through a reappraisal of the critical literature on

workplace exercise, the analysis seeks to answer two questions: How do managers perceive employee health in

the intersection between individual responsibility and collective community? How can the performative

potentials of workplace exercise be critically understood?

Design/methodology/approach –Weuse an institutional approach along with critical theories on management

in which we argue that specific logics guide certain practices, values and beliefs within organizations. This

qualitative study relies on insights from three diverse Danish workplaces that have implemented exercise during

workhours.

Findings –Adopting exercise and play as elements inspired by community sports becomes a powerful

managerial technique. Managers combine practices such as play and voluntarism with the logics of profession

and corporation. This gives rise to practices known from community sport that can lead to micro-emancipations

during work as well as to subtle forms of managerial power by hiding explicit references to employee health.

Originality/value –By combining an institutional logics perspective with critical views, the study contributes to

the growing body of research on workplace exercise by pointing to the potentials and constraints of adopting a

community logic into practices. The study adds nuances to the view on workplace exercise in the critical

management literature as well as illustrating the conditions necessary to make exercise and health promotion

reconcilable with existing managerial practices.

Keywords Workplacehealth promotion, Critical management studies, Embeddedness, Critical performativity,

Micro-emancipation

Paper type Research paper

Introduction

The lack of physical activity has been identified as a global pandemic (Kohl et al., 2012).

Inactive bodies are associated with pathologies such as increased rates of type 2 diabetes and

obesity, and inactivity reduces the ability to participate in work and leisure activities (Bull

et al., 2004;Sigal et al., 2006). Much effort has been made to counteract this pandemic of

“obesity” or “inactivity,” and since the 1970s, public health programs have advocated the

importance of a healthy lifestyle (Larsen, 2012;Skille and Solbakken, 2011;Warburton,

2006). Exercise as a therapeutic idea has been suggested and promoted as a medicine to

counter this development and simultaneously critically considered by scholars (Cairney et al.,

2018) due to marginalization and exclusions (Nicholls et al., 2018) and the ignoring of risks of

injuries due to a conflation of exercise and competitive sports (Pullen and Malcolm, 2018). As

a consequence, the rhetorical construction of physical inactivity as a pandemic might propose

exercise as a nostalgic rather than actually applicable solution to the problem (Piggin and

Bairner, 2016).

Workplace health promotion (WHP) integrating exercise and physical activities into work

hours has gained attention in research and practice (European Agency for Safety and Health at

International

Journal of

Workplace Health

Management

25

This study is partly funded by a larger project led by the Danish Confederation for Company Sport and is

financially supported by Trygfonden.

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:

https://www.emerald.com/insight/1753-8351.htm

Received 30 March 2023

Revised 19 February 2024

Accepted 10 October 2024

InternationalJournal of Workplace

HealthManagement

Vol.18 No. 1, 2025

pp.25-41

©Emerald Publishing Limited

1753-8351

DOI10.1108/IJWHM-03-2023-0044

Work,2012;Griffiths, 1996;Maravelias, 2011;Sloan, 1987;Till, 2014;Zoller, 2004) and has,

for example, been shown to improve mood and self-reported performance (Coulson et al.,

2008). A dominant approach to understanding health interventions has been informed by

epidemiological methodological ways of showing the statistical health effects of different

interventions (Cancelliere et al., 2011;Goetzel et al., 2014;Rongen et al., 2013;Sjøgaard

et al., 2016;To et al., 2013). In the tradition of (occupational) medicine, scientific evidence is

ranked by the scientific methodological hierarchy, which sees randomized control trials (RCT)

as the highest order of scientific evidence, whereas anecdotal evidence (i.e. qualitative studies)

is the least objective methodology (Goetzel et al., 2014;Lowe and Dick, 2014). While these

interventions may prove effective, they can be hard to prioritize in routinized organizational

work settings beyond the temporary scope of an assisted intervention (Gough et al., 2020;To

et al., 2013). An additional limitation of RCT interventions is that they struggle to explain the

social and organizational mechanisms modifying the effectiveness of the interventions

(Skivington et al., 2021). While epidemiologic research convincingly makes the case of

workplace exercise interventions as a way to gain (measurable) health benefits, their scope and

methodology do not uncover how organizational structures, culture and managerial power

affect employees in a broader sense, and they also fail to address how implementation tasks are

best handled by change agents and/or management (Justesen et al., 2017).

The purpose of this paper is to show how workplace exercise becomes a management

technique seeking to change employee behavior through play-like activities, and we question

whether, and to what extent, exercise at work is reconcilable with the challenging practices of

(middle) management. To provide new empirical insights into these mechanisms, we first

unfold a theoretical framework informed by institutional theory and views from critical

management studies to understand how exercise is an institutionalized practice drawing upon

and promoting its own logics of values and beliefs.

A reappraisal of the critical literature

To frame our subsequent theoretical approach and discussion, we reappraise the critical

literature on workplace exercise (WPE), which enables us to problematize (Sandberg and

Alvesson, 2011), or contribute to, some of the implicit assumptions embedded in this work. We

argue that critical assumptions, on the one hand, represent a legitimate counterbalance to

epidemiological studies’ neglect of power, culture, exclusion mechanisms and dominance. On

the other hand, critical studies on managerial implementations of workplace initiatives such as

exercise often fail to identify the health-improving, empowering or even emancipatory

potentials of organizational practices (Spicer et al., 2009), and while new discourses on

workplace health and managerial techniques emphasize a certain desired lifestyle of managers

and employees, they also create spaces for resistance or reinterpretation (Foucault, 1982,

1984). By viewing power and resistance as intertwined rather than dichotomized (Fleming and

Spicer, 2008) in a context of health promotion, it can be perceived as both productive and

constraining in terms of individual and collective actions (Golob and Giles, 2013), and these

actions can potentially lead to health promotion as well as emancipatory practices disrupting

existing power relations. Our approach emphasizes potentialities for micro-emancipations

defined as limited and temporary spheres of alternative ways of organizing work contrary to

large-scale ideological emancipations leading to radical social changes (Spicer et al., 2009).

Much of the critical management literature focuses on how WHP and WHE make

workplace values affect personal life as they target employee lifestyle and self beyond

corporate settings (Allender et al., 2006;Dailey et al., 2018;Haunschild, 2003;Maravelias,

2018;McGillivray, 2002;Thanem and Wallenberg, 2015;Zoller, 2003), and that

contemporary neoliberalism leads to individualization processes fostering self-managing

employees and further promotes exercise at work as a technology of the self (Kelly et al., 2007;

Maravelias, 2011). A common claim is that WHP becomes less a question of direct dominance

and control; rather, WHP functions effectively through the individualization, governmentality

and free choice of the individual (Maravelias, 2018). In this way, the exercising employee can

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