Managing repetition strain injury in Ontario newspaper workplaces: An ethnography of governance

This study examines how workplace managers in four Ontario newspaper organizations deal with a complex health problem—repetitive strain injury (or ‘RSI’)—under contemporary conditions which include uncertainty about work, flexibility in organizational structures, and looseness in occupational health and safety regulation. Using a Foucauldian-inspired governmentality theoretical framework, this study describes manager discourse on RSI, that is, how managers conceptualize, talk about, and respond to RSI in their workplaces.; During the winter of I999, open-ended interviews were conducted with thirty-five managers at four newspaper workplaces in Southern Ontario. An ‘ethnography of governance’ method was used for data collection and analysis. This method focused on how managers shape RSI-related conduct in informal workplace power relations and what broader conditions contribute to managers' discourse.; The managers interviewed had formed discourse on RSI as fundamentally a moral hazard rather than an environmental problem. Managers saw RSI as a ‘mindset’ which leads workers to frame any variety of ailments as work-related, and RSI as a ‘physical strain’ which is problematic only as a result of poor self-care practices. Manager discourse was centred on neoliberal notions of workers as informed, calculating, rational and able to deflect RSI risk. While managers held differing ‘truths’ about the nature of RSI at each workplace, each of these ‘truths’ had a corresponding strategy which functioned to shift the incalculable risk of RSI into a calculable and manageable form.; An effect of managers' governing rationality is that workers tend not to be given the benefit of the doubt for a complex condition such as RSI. Indeed, manager discourse was oriented to worker ‘responsibility to know’ about RSI risks rather than to worker ‘right to know’ about RSI hazards. This study points to discourses on responsibility, risk, and deservingness in manager ideas, practice and governance which affect the consideration and treatment of worker health and which may restrict workers' access to workers compensation for RSI.