More Than a Buzzword: Wellbeing in Organizations

Wellbeing is a powerful, institutionalized concept in uniformed organizations around the world. With the emergence of numerous policies, strategies, and practices that both explicitly and implicitly address wellbeing in the workplace, the concept has come to feature prominently. Importantly, wellbeing means different things to different people, but it means something to everyone.

At the surface level, wellbeing can look like healthy eating, exercising, quitting smoking, or getting eight hours of sleep a night. It manifests as wellbeing policies and practices within organizations that attend to many of these surface level understandings. However, wellbeing is much more complex than this. It impacts daily work practices and goes to influence retention, mental health, stress, work relationships, flourishing, and beyond. With that, it has political, economic, and social implications from legitimacy in the community to increased stress leave on the taxpayer’s account to cases of officer/employee suicide (Ferrill, 2022). We have a social imperative to address the underlying characteristics associated with wellbeing across the uniformed services.

This panel invites papers that address wellbeing through a sociological lens in uniformed organizations: police forces, emergency medical services (ambulance), military, fire services, and so on. It aims to transcend the prominent psychological and subjective approaches and initiate conversations around how wellbeing is conceived to bring about an understanding as to what it means to people. As a result, we are better positioned to attend to wellbeing in the workplace.