Productive Feelings: The Moral Meanings of Burnout in the U.S. since the 1970s

Elyssa Fogleman, UC Davis

Burnout is a conceptually fuzzy health condition that has the potential to take on a myriad of meanings, making it a site for definitional struggle. Most work on burnout centers on the definitional power of psychology since it first became an object of psychological knowledge in the mid-1970s. I expand this view by tracing how burnout has been used in business management literature to understand interventions, practices, and justifications for managing burnout in this space. In general, the professional use of burnout biases toward individual and organizational responsibility for the onset of burnout and intervention. This tends to obscure the changing political and economic context in which it is defined and negotiated, treating the condition as an ahistorical phenomenon. The question I address is how do individual and organization-level interventions the dominant frame to understand burnout and what is the role of experts in defining the scope and solution to the problem? By analyzing the professional meanings of burnout in academic publications, management magazines, and training materials, I illuminate the moral lens through which personal experiences of work-related exhaustion are understood.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 86. Health, Medicine and Body