The Sociology of Health Promotion: Critical Analyses of Consumption, Lifestyle and Risk (Book) (2024)

The field of health promotion has arguably shifted over the past thirty years from being socially proactive to biomedically defensive. In many countries this has been accompanied by a gradual decline, or in some cases the almost complete removal of health promotion designated positions within Government health departments. The language or discourse used to describe the practice and discipline of health promotion is reflective of such changes. In this study, critical discourse analysis was used to determine the representation of health promotion as a practice and a discipline within 10 Australian Government weight-related public health initiatives. The analysis revealed the invisibilization of critical health promotion in favour of an agenda described as ‘preventive health’. This was achieved primarily through the textual practices of overlexicalization and lexical suppression. Excluding document titles, there were 437 uses of the terms health promotion, illness prevention, disease prevention, preventive health, preventative health in the documents analysed. The term ‘health promotion’ was used sparingly (16% of total terms), and in many instances was coupled with the term ‘illness prevention’. Conversely, the terms ‘preventive health’ and ‘preventative health’ were used extensively, and primarily used alone. The progressive invisibilization of critical health promotion has implications for the perceptions and practice of those identifying as health promotion professionals and for people with whom we work to address the social and structural determinants of health and wellbeing. Language matters, and the language and intent of critical health promotion will struggle to survive if its speakers are professionally unidentifiable or invisible.

Geoforum, 2007

Journal of Nursing Management, 2006

Aim  To stimulate debate around how health promotion practices add to the choices confronting consumers in a health market place and some implications as a consequence.Background  We live in a world characterized by consumerism, in which health professionals must compete with a wide array of other producers for the consumer's attention.Evaluation  A critical review of consumer choice related to health applying theoretical insights from the works by Zygmunt Bauman.Key issues  Nurses working at influencing the health status of consumers at an individual level (whatever the setting) need to understand how to address the acknowledgement that people are confronted with a multiplicity of choices (good and bad) in their daily lives and from which they need to make a choice. How health promotion practices are ‘sold’ to consumers is an important consideration for nurses.Conclusions  The possibility for nurses to talk past consumers and vice versa exists. Choices made by consumers are premised on what is ‘sold’, how, by whom and why and has a lot to do with how to get the attention of the consumer.

Health promotion is a relatively new health science discipline focused on creating health and wellbeing at individual, group and population levels through health and health related policies and programs. Addressing inequities in the health of people via policies and programs that address the milieu of interrelated cultural, social, economic, and political determinants of health is at the heart of health promotion practice, and as such it is a political process. A critical and salutogenic approach characterises health promotion best-practice and is well established in the health promotion literature. However, the realisation of critical and salutogenic practice can be challenging for practitioners in an environment where biomedical and behavioural health paradigms dominate. Health promotion practitioners need to partner with and learn from other disciplines that have or share similar challenges. "Health promotion is everybody's business" is a catch cry in the field and conversations with others with similar ideals, values and principles about how to work together in the pursuit of health for all are needed.

Although "health promotion" programs account for only a small proportion of health spending in OECD countries (OECD, 2000), their components (anti-smoking, pro-exercise and vaccination campaigns, for example) are often highly visible instruments of health policy. Furthermore, the case for increased spending on such programs is likely to intensify if evidence of (i) their effectiveness; and (ii) diminishing returns to spending on other categories of health services (e.g., curative and acute medical services), grows. Economists' contributions to the literatures on, inter alia, (i) rational addiction; (ii) (licit and illicit) drug use; (iii) health production; and (iv) health sector economic evaluation; are pertinent to this health sub-sector. However, no integrated economic conception of the field of health promotion has been produced. This paper provides such an account: the instruments and targets of health promotion are analysed in an integrated framework by drawing o...

RECIIS, 2007

South East Asia Journal of Public Health, 2013

Health promotion is the process of enabling people to increase control over and to improve their health and is emerging as a critical domain of public health. Over the last two decades, the medical model of health care, with its reliance upon clinically oriented experts, has begun a subtle shift that highlights towards a participatory model of health promotion emphasizing healthful lifestyles and healthy communities. This health promotion movement demands public health professionals to create alliances with other disciplines which would ultimately strengthen a holistic model of health as envisaged by World Health Organization. Health promotion encompasses five key strategies with health communication and education as cornerstones. Although developed countries have incorporated health promotion activities as an integral component of their public health system and initiated health promotion education systematically, developing countries are yet to adopt the same. The present paper att...

A photo-elicitation and a collage construction technique provide insights on the Emirates’ awareness of the negative effects of fast food consumption, the relationship between awareness and Emirates fast food consumption, and the discourses used by the Emirates when resisting fast food consumption. The study draws on two disciplinary backdrops: risk awareness and resistance to behavioral change. The findings show that risk awareness campaigns should not solely be linked to bodily concerns but need to develop messages that relate to the target audience within its social, political, and economic context. What this means conceptually is that health is no longer restricted to the individual micro-level dimension but rather emerge from the dialectical interplay between taking care of one’s self and taking care of one’s society.

British Journal of Sociology, 2002

AIDS care, 2016

In South Africa, health promotion related to HIV/AIDS has been characterised as a component of public health prevention. It has heavily utilised global health ideology to construct promotional messages that rely on neoliberal models of individual, responsible health citizenship. However, after nearly 30 years of public health messaging, there have been only minor shifts in the country's HIV prevalence rates; it has become apparent that there is disconnect between policy, programmes, and target audiences. Debates about where this disconnect occurs tend to focus on the role of problems in biomedical knowledge translation or with structural inequalities that lead to health inequity. As debates increase, artists involved in health have emerged to address an additional reason: audience interpellation. In this article, I interrogate relationships between health promotion ideology and processes of interpellation. I suggest that disconnect between the two has roots in the tone of progra...

Canadian journal of public health = Revue canadienne de santé publique

Public health, 2008

To compare and contrast the past 30-40 years of health promotion in the UK and the USA, and to identify two critical issues that relate to health promotion research and practice in both countries. Historiography and self-reflection. Although the USA and the UK share different histories of health promotion development, many of the critical issues that characterize the field are similar. Two issues are particularly notable: the concern with evidence; and the problem of translation of the science of health promotion to practice.

Although \"health promotion\" programs account for only a small proportion of health spending in OECD countries (OECD, 2000), their components (anti-smoking, pro-exercise and vaccination campaigns, for example) are often highly visible instruments of health policy. Furthermore, the case for increased spending on such programs is likely to intensify if evidence of (i) their effectiveness; and (ii) diminishing returns to spending

Zdrowie Publiczne i Zarządzanie, 2018

SAGE Publications Ltd eBooks, 2007

British Medical Bulletin, 2004

In this article the author presents a point of view which she considers central to understanding the difference between prevention – associated with the traditional discourse of public health – and health promotion, an idea in connection with which proposals are now being presented for rethinking and redirecting public health practices. This perspective relates to the limits of the health and disease concepts in relation to the concrete experiences of health and illness. On the one hand, practical awareness of this limit implies far-reaching changes in the way scientific knowledge is related to (and used in) the formulation and organization of health practices; on the other, health promotion projects also avail themselves of the concepts guiding the discourse of prevention. This leads to certain difficulties that appear as inconsistencies or gray areas in the operationalization of promotion projects, which do not always succeed in asserting their nature as distinct from traditional preventive practices. Resumo A autora apresenta uma perspectiva que considera fundamental para a compreensão da diferença entre prevenção – associada ao discurso tradicional da saúde pública – e promoção da saúde, uma idéia dentro da qual propostas estão sendo apresentadas para repensar e redire-cionar as práticas em saúde pública. Essa perspectiva tem a ver com os limites dos conceitos da saúde e da doença em relação à experiência concreta das mesmas. Por um lado, a consciência prática desse limite implica em mudanças abrangentes na maneira pela qual o conhecimento científico se relaciona com, e é usado para, a formulação e organização das práticas sanitárias; por outro, os projetos de promoção da saúde também lançam mão dos conceitos orientadores do discurso preventivista. Isso leva a certas dificuldades que aparecem como inconsistências ou áreas nebulosas na operacionalização dos projetos de promoção, que nem sempre conseguem se diferenciar das práticas preventivas tradicionais.