Obesity in organizational context

Obesity as a basis of workplace discrimination

There is overwhelming evidence that obesity makes a difference in organizational life. There are widespread stereotypes that obese and overweight people are lazy, lacking in self-discipline, less competent and sloppy (Halse, 2009; Puhl and Heuer, 2009). Slenderness, on the other hand, generally signifies health and discipline; it is a mark of class and a means of upward social mobility, especially for women, but increasingly also for men (Gracia-Arnaiz, 2010). In workplace settings, this translates into considerable disadvantages for the obese, as is clear from a recent review by Puhl and Heuer (2009). Obese and overweight people are consistently penalized when it comes to wages and employment rates, even after controlling for socioeconomic and other related factors. Experimental studies demonstrate that overweight applicants and employees are more negatively evaluated in matters of hiring, salary assignments, placement decisions and co-worker ratings. Self-report studies also indicate that perceptions of weight-based employment discrimination are common. In one survey querying overweight and obese women, for instance, 54 percent reported experiencing weight stigma from co-workers or colleagues, and 43 percent reported weight stigma from supervisors or employers. Examples of experienced weight stigma included being targets of derogatory comments and jokes from co-workers, as well as not being hired, being denied promotion or fired because of one’s weight (Puhl and Brownell, 2006).

Pressures to be slim can be particularly strong for service sector employees with extensive public contact, such as female flight attendants, who are subjected to constant weight watching through self and peer surveillance (Tyler and Abbott, 1998). However, such pressures also exist in knowledge-intensive work. For instance, US studies have shown that overweight male lawyers are paid less than normal-weight male lawyers, and that obese persons working in professional jobs are more likely to report employment discrimination than obese non-professionals (Puhl and Heuer, 2009).

Obesity is only one of many existing bases of discrimination in organizations and perhaps not the most serious one. Still, the increasing focus on obesity as a health problem makes it an area of legitimate concern of organizations and managers vis-a-vis employees (Mik-Meyer, 2008, 2010), which other causes of discrimination are usually not. Organizational health initiatives in general, such as smoking bans and wellness programmes, have moralizing dimensions involving strong norms and concerns for a disciplined workforce (Allender et al., 2006; Brewis and Grey, 2008; McGillivray, 2005). However, unlike most other health-related matters addressed by employers, obesity is a conspicuous physical characteristic that cannot be hidden or temporarily put aside and, unlike smoking, it has no rival connotations of glamour or hipness (see Brewis and Grey, 2008; Saguy and Riley, 2005: 913–914). Obesity is distinctive in that the intensified discussion of health risks can reinforce stigmatization of a highly visible and derided group (Basdevant, 2010; Saguy and Riley, 2005).

Obesity and the nexus of gender, class and ethnicity

Body weight and expectations of ideal body weight intersect in manifold ways with several factors of discrimination, notably gender, class and ethnicity (Sobal and Maurer, 1999). Obesity is more frequent among men, but more stigmatizing for women. It is a sign and also a cause of poverty, especially for women, since weight-based discrimination in education and employment processes makes obese women downwardly socially mobile (Rothblum, 1992). The escalating ‘fatphobia’ in western culture is sexist in that it discredits fatness as feminine and feminizing filth, but it also strikes large-sized men, who are shamed and made to account for their putatively unhealthy bodies (Monaghan, 2008). Discrimination because of weight apparently reproduces social differences, often in subtle ways that concern not just the obese. Bourdieu (1984: 206–207) noted that women are slimmer and more self-confident higher up in the social hierarchy, and that petit-bourgeois women, insecure but aware of the usefulness of beauty in the labour market, devote great investments to improving their appearance.

Obesity is more frequent in low-income and minority groups, but the underlying relations are complex. In the USA, obesity is inversely related to socioeconomic status among white men and strongly so among white women, while there is a weaker negative relationship among black and Mexican American women, and actually a positive relationship between obesity and socioeconomic status among black and Mexican American men (Zhang and Wang, 2004). Such social differences also appear to reproduce obesity, which in its turn can reinforce social inequalities. In groups with low socioeconomic status, obesity can entail a symbolic capital, which may be one of the few forms of capital people in these groups possess; the purchase of fast food can be a form of objectified capital when other forms of bought status are out of reach (Ulijaszek, 2011).

It would be a mistake to think that the social dynamics around obesity and body weight concerns obese and overweight people exclusively, even if they are of course particularly affected. These marginal groups are certainly pointed out and problematized within the prevailing obesity discourse, but the group that is actually targeted and meant to take caution is the centre, that is, the relatively thin population that is the object of preventive campaigns and that is already harbouring anxieties of becoming overweight (Guthman and DuPuis, 2006). As Bordo (1993) and other feminist scholars have exposed, the social and cultural preoccupation with body size is highly generalized; the fear of fat has become a form of pervasive discipline, engaging women and increasingly men in constant micropractices of self-monitoring. Dieting is a permanent condition for most of the population in western post-industrial societies, which paradoxically appears to fuel both obesity and eating disorders such as anorexia (Gracia-Arnaiz, 2010). Again, however, the intersections with gender, class and ethnicity are complicated. According to dominant western ideals of masculinity, men should neither be skinny nor fat, but muscular, and at the same time not care too much about their bodily appearance. Young men in their lower teens interviewed in a Canadian study negotiated this double bind by disavowing dieting but embracing sports. Some white youths among them positioned themselves discursively between racial constructions of hyper-embodied black masculinity on one hand and the cerebral ‘castrated’ Asian masculine subject on the other (Norman, 2011: 441) – a stereotype resisted by the Korean-Canadian young men interviewed in a similar study (Rail et al., 2010: 270).

Obesity in everyday organizational life

How obesity may play out in everyday work organizations is suggested by two interview-based studies exploring women’s experiences of their embodied identities at work (Brewis and Sinclair, 2000; Trethewey, 1999). Body weight and the particular demands put on women at work to be slim and controlled in their bodily expressions – sufficiently feminine, but not overly so – are central themes in both accounts. All the respondents in the study by Brewis and Sinclair made reference to the issue of weight, suggesting that they were or had been unhappy with their body size. A majority commented that they currently felt overweight. The professional women interviewed by Trethewey both recounted and displayed the attitude that excess body fat signals lack of self-control and untrustworthiness. In their mind and experience, a professional body was first and foremost a fit body, that is, a non-fat body that is able to work hard and is presentable in professional context. For instance, one of the professionals had been hesitant to send her overweight assistant into corporate settings and had been told by others that she could not do so. She had discovered that it was actually not a problem, but having herself been overweight, she still found it unthinkable that she should have put her 200 pound body on ‘display’ at professional business gatherings. In both studies, several interviewees reflected critically on prevailing body ideals. Some of them also saw advantages of a larger size (notably that it is less gendered and thus more easily combined with a managerial role), as well as disadvantages of being slim (notably the risk of being the object of sexualized attention or even harassment). Yet, both respondents who were themselves overweight and saw benefits with it also suspected that colleagues and superiors might doubt their managerial capabilities because of their inability to control their weight. The meanings surrounding body weight and the female body in professional context are not fixed, but rather a site of struggle and contestation (Trethewey, 1999).

A recent qualitative case study of sport and identity in management consultancy firms found that female and male employees alike were under strong pressures to be slim and fit (Costas, 2010). The studied companies cultivated an image of a vigorous, competitive and enduring professional who is actively engaged in challenging sports. This ideal was full of masculine connotations and so reinforced gender inequalities. There were also conflicting demands facing both men and women. Despite the emphasis on sports and health, the working conditions implied long work hours, little sleep and constant sitting by the desk, which made it difficult in practice to stay in shape. Once again, we can note how exploratory studies carried out in organizational settings reveal a degree of variety, ambiguity and conflict that is not discernible on the field level and that deserves further empirical investigation.

Studying obesity in organizations

These results from previous research indicate that the role of obesity and body weight in organizational settings is a highly relevant topic for further research. It merits attention in its own right and in relation to several important issues within organization studies, especially gender, intersectionality, organizational control and reproduction of social dominance. However, there are no doubt considerable methodological challenges involved. It seems clear that obesity is generally not openly talked about, neither in everyday organizational situations nor among organizational scholars. In her study of women’s embodied identities at work, Trethewey (1999) notes that many of the interviewed professionals hesitated to respond to questions concerning what a professional body looks like. Some described how others would define a professional body rather than their own perceptions, and others refused to answer the question directly, even if they did so tacitly later on in the interview. In addition, the connection between professionalism and a certain notion of fitness (i.e. that fitness equals slimness) was almost taken for granted. It cannot be expected that people will be ready and able to immediately account for how they perceive and act on matters of body weight in their work. Other methods than interviews directly addressing obesity are called for, particularly when it comes to discriminatory and excluding practices.

Another methodological challenge is attitudes among researchers themselves. There is a tendency to analyse organizations as if they were disembodied phenomena, as pointed out by proponents of the embodied turn in organization studies (Dale, 2005; Hassard et al., 2000). In social science in general, the body appears to be an ‘absent presence’, that is, something that is taken for granted rather than duly recognized and systematically investigated (Shilling, 1993: 19). In the context of obesity studies, Wright (2009) claims that Shilling’s critique elides the early contributions of feminist theorists who have long explored the links between social structures, cultural ideals and the body. As we have seen, the few existing studies that consider body weight issues in everyday organizational context do have a feminist orientation (Brewis and Sinclair, 2000; Costas, 2010; Trethewey, 1999; Tyler and Abbott, 1998). Yet, the disregard of bodily matters appears to be particularly strong and systematic when organizations are concerned. Organizations are often meant to be spaces of reason, cognition and self-control, premised on an instrumental rationality that forecloses ‘lower’ bodily impulses (Cunha et al., 2008; Hassard et al., 2000). This is especially problematic for women, since they are by tradition seen as more emotional and bodily than men (Brewis and Sinclair, 2000). The academic culture of organization studies itself equally valorizes mind over body. Even within critical management studies, with its ambitions to dismantle destructive power structures, there is an inclination to simultaneously practice and deny body pedagogics that reproduce social and particularly masculine dominance (Bell and King, 2010).

There appears to be an implicit tendency to consider questions relating to the body as less ‘serious’ and worthy of attention by organizational researchers. The issue of obesity, which marks low social status and precarity, may be particularly uncomfortable to approach. There is ample reason to refuse such impulses and to include not just gender but also obesity in the range of legitimate objects of inquiry in organizational study. This entails trying to break away from preconceived, taken-for-granted assumptions that can lie in the way of a proper understanding of the phenomenon. One way to do that in relation to social problems is to consider their history and how the instruments of their construction have been elaborated (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 209). The social construction of obesity and its recent emergence as a major social problem has been systematically investigated by historians and social scientists from different fields, often from critical perspectives. As we will now see, the area provides valuable openings to explore important organizational processes; notably, how knowledge is instrumentalized and mobilized to govern people. And as it happens, it also offers new opportunities to investigate empirically how obesity plays out in organizations.

The social construction of obesity

Once mainly seen as a trivially aesthetic or moral issue for the individual (Sobal, 1995), fatness is nowadays construed as ‘obesity’ – a dangerous disease of epidemic proportions and a serious threat to the well-being of society. This has come about through a whole labour of definition, classification and dissemination of standards, involving a host of organizations and professions. Some key aspects of the process demonstrate to what extent obesity is an organized phenomenon.

The designation of obesity as a disease carries important implications. A disease label creates a basis for ordering social and physical realities; it transforms the people concerned into persons belonging to a certain category, and it legitimizes and calls for medical treatment (Hacking, 2004–2005; Jutel, 2006; Sobal, 1995). Obesity was ‘medicalized’ over the latter part of the past century, with increasing agreement among experts that it needs to be professionally diagnosed, treated and researched (Sobal, 1995). One landmark event in the official recognition of obesity as a disease is a consensus conference organized in 1985 by the premier US research authority, the National Institutes of Health (Greenway and Smith, 2000; Sobal, 1995), even if a code for obesity has existed in the International Classification of Diseases since 1948 (Kopelman and Finer, 2001). Overweight is defined differently and not clearly labelled as a disease, but in recent decades there has been an increasing tendency in both popular and medical texts to approach overweight with the language and concern usually associated with illness, for example, by presenting clinical guidelines for the ‘treatment’ and ‘prevention’ of being overweight (Jutel, 2006, 2009). The origin of the now commonly used term ‘morbid obesity’ for extreme cases is also telling. It was coined in the 1960s by American bariatric surgeons in order to persuade health insurance administrators that surgery for grossly obese patients was motivated on medical grounds, even if most doctors saw it as an elective and radical intervention (Oliver, 2006: 624; Van Itallie, 1980: 358).

The emergence and establishment of the Body Mass Index (BMI) as a standard normative measure is an important aspect of the crystallization of obesity into a clearly defined and actionable entity (Hacking, 2005; Halse, 2009). Easily measurable, calculable and comparable, the BMI – weight in kg/(height in m)² – is used to authoritatively define the limits of overweight (BMI 25−29.9), obesity (30 and above) and the different classes of increasingly severe obesity (World Health Organization, 2000). It is generally recognized that the BMI is only a proxy for what really matters (i.e. the proportion and distribution of fat tissue), that the cut-off points are inevitably arbitrary, and that the BMI should be applied with caution and preferably combined with waist–hip ratio in individual cases (e.g. Kopelman, 2000). Still, the BMI is routinely used in self-check recommendations, treatment guidelines and clinical practice (e.g. NHS Choices, 2013).

The generalized adoption of the BMI happened remarkably recently. For a long time, the most promulgated standard was the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tables of Ideal Body Weight (Sobal, 1995). With a background in 19th-century anthropometry and 1960s epidemiology, the BMI was named as such in 1972, recommended in the medical field from the 1980s onwards, and internationally established with its present standard values by a World Health Organization Obesity Task Force convening in 1997 (De Saint Pol, 2007; Hacking, 2006; Keys et al., 1972; World Health Organization, 2000). The main advantage of the BMI measure is that it is easy to obtain and use for calculations on both individuals and vast populations. The World Health Organization (WHO) threshold values were set by practical considerations. The previously used threshold for overweight in the USA was higher and different for women (27.3) and men (27.8). When the more practical and universal cut-off point of 25 recommended by the WHO was introduced, the number of overweight adults in the USA instantaneously rose from 61.7 million to 97.1 million, which illustrates the importance of standard values (De Saint Pol, 2007: 13–14).

Alerts that obesity is spreading like an epidemic have intensified since the 1990s and heightened the general concern for obesity as a serious health threat (Gard, 2011; Wright, 2009). Governmental and non-governmental organizations worldwide have responded with national and local action plans (Bergeron and Castel, 2010). A variety of experts have engaged in crafting effective interventions, including marketing scholars designing methods for promotion of healthy eating (Dresler-Hawke and Veer, 2006) and profitable strategies for food companies to help people eat less (Chandon and Wansink, 2012; Wansink and Huckabee, 2005). The ‘obesity discourse’ has made obesity into a matter that calls for not just individual treatment, but for public action, especially preventive programmes and regulations targeting children, families and schools (Wright and Harwood, 2009). Again, the BMI plays a pivotal role, allowing obesity to be conveniently tracked and compared in different populations and over time (Bossy, 2010). According to Oliver (2006) the idea of an obesity epidemic had its breakthrough in the USA in 1998, thanks to an evocative PowerPoint slide show prepared by a director at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A series of US maps showed how obesity rates had increased since 1985, illustrated by first darkening blue and then the dramatic appearance and spread of red as more and more states moved from obesity rates of less than 10 percent to first above 10 and then above 20 percent. The slide show made information that had previously been available only in abstruse statistical tables readily accessible; it was freely downloadable from the internet, and it had a huge impact among health professionals and the general public.

All these aspects of the social construction of obesity have been scrutinized by critical obesity scholars. They question the labelling of obesity and overweight as diseases (Jutel, 2009; Oliver, 2006). They claim that the health risks are overblown and that prevention campaigns and treatments are ineffectual (Beausoleil, 2009; Evans and Colls, 2009; Monaghan, 2005), that the BMI is enrolled in a moralizing and subjugating ‘virtue discourse’ (Halse, 2009), that the term ‘epidemic’ is speculative and misleading (Evans, 2003; Monaghan, 2005), and that preventive efforts serve to blame and discipline disadvantaged families (Evans and Colls, 2009; Wright and Harwood, 2009). They also point at the array of actors who have an interest in sustaining the obesity discourse, such as researchers in search of funding, media outlets that wish to air moral issues and the whole weight-loss industry with its commercial interests (Jutel, 2009; Monaghan et al., 2010; Oliver, 2006). The most important thing in the present context, however, is to recognize the extent to which obesity is a social fact (Durkheim, 1977 [1894]) and the result of organizational processes.

Governmentality, self-technologies and obesity politics

The ‘war on obesity’ is an exemplary empirical case of the Foucauldian notions of governmentality and technologies of the self. Governmentality is a certain contemporary rationality and mode of exercise of power based in systems of knowledge (Foucault, 1991; Miller and Rose, 1990; Rose et al., 2006). Governing is understood in the broad sense of techniques and procedures for directing human behaviour, including technologies of the self, meant for self-scrutiny and self-improvement (Foucault, 1988; Rose, 1998). For public health initiatives in this line, the goal is not to directly control people, but to engage them actively in a healthier lifestyle, following the precepts of appropriate experts (Coveney, 1998; Share and Strain, 2008; Thanem, 2009). Governmentality operates and can be analysed at different levels (Miller and Rose, 1990). Social problems in need of intervention are identified and constructed at the level of political rationalities, engendering programmes that are brought about by specific technologies – apparently trivial mechanisms for notation, investigation, classification and representation. In the case of anti-obesity politics, obesity is constructed as an epidemic threat to society, which motivates specific strategies, policies and plans for prevention and treatment. Technologies such as the BMI measure and the threshold values for obesity and overweight help to make the problem actionable and enable targeted individuals to monitor and correct themselves.

The governmentality approach is a versatile way of asking questions about how we are governed through combined processes of regulation and self-control, allowing interrogation of discourses as well as practices and experiences (Evans and Colls, 2009; Rose et al., 2006). It is increasingly deployed and discussed in organization studies (Gleadle et al., 2008; McKinlay et al., 2012). It has inspired investigations of diverse phenomena, such as how accounting concepts and calculations constitute organizations and governable persons (e.g. Hoskin, 1998; Miller and O’Leary, 1987; Spence and Rinaldi, 2013), how human resource management practices render employees manageable and circulable (Townley, 1993; Weiskopf and Munro, 2012), and how mutually agreed performance indicators and injunctions to constant self-improvement enable inter-organizational project collaboration (Clegg et al., 2002).

In critical obesity work, the governmentality approach has proven extremely useful (Evans and Colls, 2009) and much interesting research is conducted from this perspective. In a general analysis, Guthman and DuPuis (2006) claim that neoliberal governmentality produces contradictory impulses for the ideal citizen, on the one hand, to exercise choice by freely consuming the excesses of food produced and, on the other hand, to show sufficient self-restraint and responsibility to be slim. In this context, the obesity discourse is a form of discipline which uses at-risk subgroups as examples to warn the ‘normal’, and thinness constitutes a sign of distinction that legitimizes social differences. Thanem (2009) emphasizes similar incongruous tendencies in a study of a UK campaign for healthy eating that displayed a managerialist form of neoliberal governmentality. The campaign encouraged self-enjoyment and self-fulfilment through eating tastier, healthier foods, while it also offered concrete means of self-monitoring and self-management, rendering individuals free but also restrained, expected to freely adopt a healthy lifestyle.

Several researchers with a Foucauldian approach investigate efforts to curb childhood obesity by targeting schools, families and young people. In a critical examination of an Irish national taskforce report, Share and Strain (2008) uncovered a discourse of governmentality that supported responsible, self-reflexive individuals who exert their freedom by doing ‘the right thing’. Students and schools were responsibilized without additional financial support and without recognition of the unequal material opportunities to exercise choice. A recent anthology treats the obesity epidemic in connection to biopolitics, that is, the aspect of governmentality that concerns the regulation of bodies (Wright and Harwood, 2009). It explores the various ‘biopedagogies’ urging people to work on themselves that can be found across a range of different sites, not just in schools and public health campaigns, but also in popular TV shows and other media. Burrows’ (2009) contribution argues that a reality TV series featuring families with overweight children fed on parental guilt and shame, and that the phenomenon of watching other people who are being surveilled is an extraordinary additional neoliberal tactic of governance. Similar conclusions are drawn in a recent study of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver’s televised attempt to engage a whole British town in healthy cooking regimes of self-discipline and transformation (Warin, 2011). The cultural technology of reality TV, disciplinary surveillance technologies and technologies of self-governance converged, it is claimed, into a novel form of obesity prevention characteristic of neoliberal governmentality.

Contentions surrounding obesity

What makes it interesting to study obesity from a governmentality perspective is not just the close fit between its conceptual tenets and efforts to govern obesity, but even more so the controversies, ambiguities and complexities that characterize the social organization of obesity. This could help to avoid the deterministic accounts with little room for change, agency and resistance that Focualdian analysis is sometimes criticized for. Foucault’s later writings on technologies of the self have attracted increasing interest because they sketch the prospect of a certain personal freedom and ability to ethical action, as opposed to the panoptical control described in earlier writings and organizational applications (Barratt, 2008; Chan and Garrick, 2002; Starkey and Hatchuel, 2002; Starkey and McKinlay, 1998). While most empirical studies of self-technologies in organizational settings appear to deal with how employees are aligned with managerial priorities, several authors also discuss the enabling, or at least potentially enabling, qualities of techniques for self-reflection and self-development (e.g. Thornborrow and Brown, 2009; Townley, 1995; Tracy, 2000). The governmentality perspective on the whole has been criticized for overgeneralizations and lack of attention to human agency (Newton, 1998; Rose et al., 2006), but also appreciated as a way out of totalizing portrayals of power (Leclercq-Vandelannoitte, 2011; Weiskopf and Munro, 2012). A seminal work within this approach emphasizes that attempts to govern actually encounter problems and unintended consequences so often that government can be characterized as a ‘congenitally failing operation’ (Miller and Rose, 1990: 10). It is precisely the frustrated ambitions and undesired effects that generate ever new and ingenious attempts to govern.

One complexity concerning the governing of obesity is that the medicalization of obesity has never been universally acknowledged, not even in health care. Many doctors, nurses and other health professionals do not consider obesity a disease and are not particularly motivated or optimistic about treating it (Greener et al., 2010; Hansson et al., 2011; Sobal, 1995). For instance, one intervention directed to parents of overweight and obese children was stalled because of limited acceptance of medical categories (Levay, 2010). Parents’ perceptions of children being overweight differed from the established medical definition in terms of BMI and doctors responsible for the intervention suspected that nurses in primary care applied lay perceptions when screening children of potential participants. This led to considerable difficulties in recruiting participants for the intervention.

There is also a deliberate counter-movement driven by fat acceptance activists. They organize to fight discrimination on the basis of body weight and refuse the labelling of large body size as a disease or a sign of moral deficiency (Le Breton, 2010; Sobal, 1995). At least in the USA, the movement has been remarkably successful and achieved increasing recognition of problems related to size discrimination, seats at the table of health care agencies when obesity is debated and adjustment of guidelines given to health professionals (Saguy and Riley, 2005). As we have seen, there are also critical scholars who contest the obesity discourse and their interest was originally sparked by fat acceptance activism (Saguy and Riley, 2005). While they have had little impact at the level of government and mainstream medicine, they have gained momentum in the public and academic domains in the past few years (Gard, 2009; Wright, 2009)

Obesity struggles in close-up

Obesity prevention and weight reduction schemes are often unsuccessful. Guthman (2009: 1117) notes that ‘[w]hat is so interesting about obesity talk is that it seems to produce more anxiety about obesity but fails to eradicate the behaviors that it attempts to educate people about’. Some critical scholars discuss this as a kind of resistance. The healthy eating campaign investigated by Thanem (2009) got people to eat more fruit and vegetables, but not to consume less unhealthy foods. Thanem claims that the flexibility, openness and ambiguities of the neoliberal governmentality manifested in the campaign made it vulnerable to a range of micro-resistances, either by simple rejection of the healthy eating message or by more cynical responses, such as smoking or obsessive dieting. Azzarito (2009) suggests that the modest result of obesity prevention programmes for children and youth, often targeting minority youth, could be explained by young people’s resistance and rebellion against disciplining practices of the body. In a society where obesity is stigmatized and the body is the main material for self-perfection and social recognition, being obese can be a way to demonstrate indifference and refusing to play the game, even if it comes at the price of contempt (Le Breton, 2010).

Other obesity studies also report various forms of resistance. Interviews with school youths aged 12−16 years showed that they largely embraced dominant discourses on body weight and health, but still reflected critically on issues such as the high cost of healthy foods, the obstacles to healthy living present at school and the health risks of being too skinny (Beausoleil, 2009). The televised community campaign led by TV chef Jamie Oliver mentioned above provoked outright opposition (Warin, 2011). Mothers brought burgers and crisps to school for their children to eat instead of the redesigned healthier lunches meant to be the only option. Resistance groups were formed, a blog called ‘Jamie go home’ was set up for scathing running commentary and football fans who were approached to support the campaign answered with derogatory chants (Warin, 2011). In Warin’s interpretation, the mother who led the dissent performed a generative counter power by challenging her ascribed identity of failed parent in need of expert guidance and by articulating the nuanced realities of local history, poverty and class that were otherwise ignored in the TV show.

To a large extent, the access to such complexities seems to be a question of methodology. The closer researchers get to empirical cases of people touched by obesity discourses and techniques, and not just to formal policy documents, the more complex and varied the picture becomes. In a multi-method case study of health education in the classroom, Leahy (2009) highlights the ‘bio’ in biopedagogies and stresses the need to engage in the messiness of the governmental project as an assemblage. Expert knowledge was very much part of the assemblage performed in the observed classes, but to get their message through, teachers also mobilized bodily responses of disgust for fat people and feelings of pride and shame when pupils had their lunchboxes inspected. Similarly, in an ethnographic fieldwork of commercial slimming clubs, Monaghan et al. (2010) found a certain flexibility when consultants and their clients applied weight classifications. Consultants and clients were respectively characterized as ‘enforcers/administrators’ and ‘entrepreneurial selves’ – two different types of ‘obesity entrepreneurs’ who actively turn fatness into a correctable problem. For the comfort of customers and the profit of the organization, slimming consultants let members choose their own ideal weight instead of imposing the BMI as a strict measure, offering a ‘rubber cage’ rather than an ‘iron cage’. Clients themselves, the entrepreneurial selves, were not necessarily inclined to follow expert definitions of a body with a BMI above 25 as overweight. Some tried to present an image of moral worth (e.g. by criticizing that overweight people are publicly condemned and made to feel like criminals).

The study offering the perhaps most complex picture of obesity governmentality is based on participant observation of weight-loss classes (Heyes, 2006). To my knowledge, it is the only study that even mentions that self-technologies employed in dieting could have the kind of liberating aspects that scholars find so interesting in the late Foucault’s work. The weight-loss programme demanded extensive self-reporting and self-reflection, not unlike the techniques of diary-writing and confession that Foucault (1988) traced in antiquity. Despite the limits of such commercial classes, designed to serve the industry’s rather than participants’ interest, the programme did actually generate real capabilities and a sense of self-development. At the same time it intensified disciplinary power relations, which thus occurred in tandem with the growth of capabilities.

The variety and creativity of responses to governmental efforts in the domain of obesity suggest that not only is governmentality a fruitful perspective to study obesity, obesity is also a fruitful topic to broaden our understanding of contemporary governmentality and self-technologies.