The Psychosocial Work Environment

Dedicated to the late Bertil Gardell, a Swedish Social Scientist, this text comprises of 18 essays that shares a common vision - the impact of work on the interconnected processes of stress and disease.

Dedicated to the late Bertil Gardell, a Swedish Social Scientist, this text comprises of 18 essays that shares a common vision - the impact of work on the interconnected processes of stress and disease.

Available online: https://pub.norden.org/temanord2021-507/ The psychosocial work environment encompasses a wide variety of factors that impact occupational health. As Nordic work life evolves, changes in the work environment must be accounted for to maintain a sustainable, healthy work life. This report discusses the results of two studies: 1) a literature study of impacts of new technologies on work environment and health, and 2) a Delphi study compiling Nordic experts' views on the future of the Nordic work environment. A central finding is that as complexity and uncertainty increase, a steady focus on protective work environment resource, perhaps most markedly worker autonomy, is important to meet future challenges. Many developments are likely to challenge and disrupt the high quality Nordic work environment. However, appropriate utilization of existing work environment resources may counteract possible adverse effects.

This book is a valuable, comprehensive and unique reference text on Psychosocial Safety Climate (PSC), a new work stress theory. It proposes a new PSC theory concerning the corporate climate for workers’ psychological health, its origins and implications for work stress, and provides a critique of current research and theories. It provides a comprehensive review of all PSC studies to date. The chapters discuss state-of-the-art empirical evidence testing PSC theory in relation to management roles, organisational resilience, corruption, organisational status, cultural perspectives, illegitimate tasks, high PSC work groups, PSC variability in work groups, etc. They investigate outcomes such as psychological distress, emotional exhaustion, depression, worry, engagement, health, cognitive decline, personal initiative, boredom, cynicism, sickness absence, and productivity loss, in various workplace settings across many countries. This unique book allows practitioners to rapidly update practical measures, benchmarks and processes, and provides students and trainees with an introduction to PSC and important concepts and methods, quantitative and qualitative, in occupational health with leads to further sources. Students as well as experts on occupational health and safety, human resource management, occupational health psychology, organisational psychology and practitioners, unions and policy makers will find this book highly informative. It covers relevant materials for undergraduate and postgraduate education, drawing upon the concepts, topics and methods (diary, multilevel, longitudinal, qualitative, data linkage) within the multidisciplinary occupational health area.

The health effects of psychosocial factors are a widely discussed and controversial topic. Do positive and negative emotions affect our risk of developing physical disease? Are depressive individuals more likely to have cancer than those with an optimistic outlook on life? And what is the role of IQ in staying healthy and recovering from disease? Importantly, can we improve our health and life expectancy by avoiding certain psychosocial risk factors and maximizing positive psychological well-being? These and other questions are the focus of psychosocial epidemiology, a discipline linking psychological, social and biological sciences. The Routledge International Handbook of Psychosocial Epidemiology is the first book to map this growing discipline. Including contributions from many of the leading researchers in the field, it is divided into five sections: Part I: Methodological challenges in studying psychosocial factors and health; Part II: Psychosocial factors in the etiology and prognosis of chronic diseases; Part III: Controversies in the psychosocial approach; Part IV: Interventions and policy implications Part V: Future research directions Taking advantage of a huge growth in research in recent years, the book provides the reader with the essentials to evaluate the diverse set of studies on psychosocial factors and health that are published today, and describes study designs in this field of research, progress in judging the validity of epidemiological evidence, as well as challenges in translating evidence into action. This is an important and timely book. Providing methodological rigour, critical analysis and the policy implications of this emerging field of study, The Routledge International Handbook of Psychosocial Epidemiology will be an invaluable resource for students and researchers within both behavioural and medical sciences, as well as policy makers and others working in health and social care.

Dedicated to the late Bertil Gardell, a Swedish Social Scientist, this text comprises of 18 essays that shares a common vision - the impact of work on the interconnected processes of stress and disease.

"In 1996, NIOSH created the National Occupational Research Agenda to advance occupational safety and health research for the nation. This agenda encompassed 21 priority research areas, including Special Populations at Risk. This priority area was created in recognition of the fact that the nation's increasingly diverse workforce contains many women, older workers, and racial and ethnic minorities. Disparities in the burden of disease, disability, and death are experienced by these groups, due in part to their disproportionate employment in high hazard industries and to certain social, cultural and political factors. This document was developed by the investigators from the University of Massachusetts Lowell at the request of the Special Populations at Risk Team to fill that gap by disseminating to the broader occupational safety and health community a concise and accessible compendium of measures used by health researchers to assess the following domains: racism and racial/ethnic prejudice, sexism and sexual harassment, gender and racial discrimination, work-family integration and balance, support for diversity in the workplace/workforce."--Page iii

Foreword by Lisa Berkman, Professor of Public Policy, Harvard UniversityHow welfare states influence population health and health inequalities has long been debated but less well tested by empirical research. This book presents new empirical evidence of the effects of Swedish welfare state structures and policies on the lives of Swedish citizens. The discussion, analysis and innovative theoretical approaches developed in the book have implications for health research and policy beyond Scandinavian borders. Drawing on a rich source of longitudinal data, the Swedish Level of Living Surveys (LNU), and other data, the authors shed light on a number of pertinent issues in health inequality research while at the same time showing how health inequalities have evolved in Sweden over several decades. Topics covered include vbTab]how structural conditions relating to family, socio-economic conditions and the welfare state are important in producing health inequalities; how health inequalities change over the lifecourse and the impact of environment on health inequalities - at home, at school, in the workplace.Health inequalities and welfare resources will be invaluable to researchers, students and practitioners in sociology, social epidemiology, public health and social policy interested in the interplay between society and health.