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The manager is sick: a sociological perspective on the links between obesity and work

In the last decade, several studies have focused on the relationship between obesity and employment, addressing this condition as disabling. These same studies combine legal, administrative and economic dimensions in the social sciences, so as to shed some discussion about the emerging topic in the historical level, and so far has not been contemplated. This same issue is to propose solutions that, in the legislative, may protect obese as individual entities, against corporate discrimination. It is through this common interest that this article appears, showing the opposite view and rebuilding the link between the rise of the individual labor and, in parallel, the weight increase. The coincidence between the body and professional trajectories arises with empirical regularity, the result of a wider investigation that recreates the social representations associated with obesity in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires. Using data collected in the same context, we will interpret them through the analysis of changes in working conditions that succeeded during the last decade in Argentina. This article will question what elements, included in the current conduct of human resources, lead workers, whose career is ascending to a corporeality which, statistically, is subject to rejection. Second, we ask what are the representations associated to the body that circulate among workers and unite them in obesity along with their labor progress. The sense of abandonment in the physical care as a result of stress and greater commitment to career appears here as one of the most significant findings of this article. On the other hand, there is a coincidence between the need to enhance the body as a malleable substance, and while I took it as a result of personal choice.

obesity; labor; body; stress


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