230129 WS Diagnosis of Society: The Thing about Gender Equality (2018W)

Sociologists should be especially interested in the relationship of health and organizations. Our present society has been characterized as a “Society of Organizations” and a “Health Society”. Organizations have become more and more central in all spheres of life, and health has become a central societal issue in the last decades. Health impacts of organizations, especially the impact of work on health, has been a core issue of health sciences and public health interventions, especially health protection and disease prevention developed since the 19th century. In the last decades (since the 1980s), health promotion has been promoted by WHO, the World Health Organization, as a new group of public health interventions. Sociology has contributed a lot to this development, particularly concerning the Settings Approach, one of the core strategies of the health promotion approach. Many of these “settings” in which we live our everyday lives, heavily impact on our health. And most of these settings are controlled or at least influenced by organizations. So intervention strategies of the Settings Approach focus try to influence organizational functioning towards optimizing its health impact.
The lecture will focus on settings like workplace, but also human service organizations like hospitals, schools, aged-care residencies etc.
The lecturer has a vast range of experience in research, development and evaluation on the settings approach in different organizational settings, but also students of the Master Program who are writing their thesis in this area are invited to contribute their research project.

Inputs and discussions will include the following issues:
- theoretical and empirical knowledge on impacts of organizations on health
- concepts of health and health promotion
- basic strategies for health promotion interventions in organizational settings, examples from schools, business companies, hospitals and long-term care facilities
- Research on the settings approach: Type and function of research (needs assessment, diagnosis, evaluation, impact analysis, action research etc.), design and methods