Caddick 2016 Understanding the health of lorry drivers in context, A critical discourse analysis.pdf (165.94 kB)
Understanding the health of lorry drivers in context: a critical discourse analysis
journal contribution
posted on 2016-03-09, 15:53 authored by Nick Caddick, Veronica Varela-MatoVeronica Varela-Mato, Myra A. Nimmo, Stacy ClemesStacy Clemes, Thomas E. Yates, James KingJames KingThis paper moves beyond previous attempts to understand health problems in the lives of professional lorry drivers by placing the study of drivers’ health in a wider social and cultural context. A combination of methods including focus groups, interviews and observations were used to collect data from a group of 24 lorry drivers working at a large transport company in the UK. Employing a critical discourse analysis, we identified the dominant discourses and subject positions shaping the formation of drivers’ health and lifestyle choices. This analysis was systematically combined with an exploration of the gendered ways in which an almost exclusively male workforce talked about health. Findings revealed that drivers were constituted within a neoliberal economic discourse, which is reflective of the broader social structure, and which partly restricted drivers’ opportunities for healthy living. Concurrently, drivers adopted the subject position of “average man” as a way of defending their personal and masculine status in regards to health, and to justify jettisoning approaches to healthy living that were deemed too extreme or irrational in the face of the constraints of their working lives. Suggestions for driver health promotion include refocusing on the social and cultural – rather than individual – underpinnings of driver health issues, and a move away from moralistic approaches to health promotion.
Funding
The research was supported by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Diet, Lifestyle & Physical Activity Biomedical Research Unit based at University Hospitals of Leicester and Loughborough University.
History
School
- Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences
Published in
Health: an interdisciplinary journal for the social study of health, illness and medicineCitation
CADDICK, N. ... et al, 2017. Understanding the health of lorry drivers in context: a critical discourse analysis. Health, 21 (1), pp.38-56.Publisher
SAGE Publications (UK and US)Version
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2017Notes
This paper was accepted for publication in the journal, Health. The definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1363459316644492ISSN
1461-7196Publisher version
Language
- en