No abstract

Psychosocial risks are widely recognized as a major challenge at work, a challenge that most organizations find difficult to manage in practice. The OHSAS 18001 standard provides a framework for the management of occupational health and safety risks, including psychosocial risks. However, such occupational health and safety management (OHSM) systems tend to have difficulties in adequately addressing psychosocial risks at work. A crucial element in the OHSM system is internal audits. We have investigated how two Danish municipalities have transformed the general audit guidelines into internal audit practices capable of targeting the psychosocial risks. The results show that the municipalities experienced difficulties in transforming the general audit guidelines into practical models, and we found that this led to significant variations in audit practices. The explanation for these difficulties can be found both in the nature of the psychosocial risks and in implementation constraints. Compared to traditional safety audits, auditing psychosocial risks appears to require different methods and auditor competencies, a factor that the OHSAS 18001 standard does not explicitly take into account. On the basis of our study, we reach two major conclusions: first, that the standard provides little help in auditing the management of psychosocial risks in relation to OHSM systems; and second, that the full potential for management of psychosocial risks cannot be achieved without developing additional methods and auditor competencies for audits of psychosocial risks.

Consumerism not only promotes discourses emphasizing individualized consumer choices, but it also introduces new electronic, invisible and symbolic forms of money. The present article analyses social exclusion in contemporary Scandinavian society by focusing on patterns of consumption and the social meaning of money in low-income households in Denmark and Sweden. Drawing on recent sociological theory on money and budgeting (

Certified occupational health and safety (OHS) management systems have become a global instrument in regulation of the work environment. However, their actual impact on OHS—in particular on softer psychosocial issues in the work environment—has been questioned. The most important standard of OHS management is OHSAS 18001, which has recently been supplemented with a British publically available guideline (PAS 1010) focusing specifically on psychosocial risk management. On the basis of the international literature on management standards, the present paper analyses OHSAS 18001 and PAS 1010 in order to understand the mechanism by which they work. The paper takes a social constructionist approach conceptualizing standards and their expected mechanisms as socially constructed—based on a particular kind of knowledge and logic—although they are presented as objective. Such a constructionist approach also emphasizes how standards transform specific work environment problems into generic procedures that can be audited. In the case of OHS standards, both the work environment in general and the psychosocial risks in particular are transformed into simple monocausal auditable relations whereby the complexity of psychosocial work environment issues seems to disappear. The new PAS 1010 guideline, which is particularly focusing on regulation of the psychosocial work environment, only partly succeeds in solving these shortcomings of OHSAS 18001.

Anti-consumption literature focuses on consumers' reasons for avoiding certain products or brands emphasizing consumers' symbolic and/or political reasons for avoidance. Consumers' choices have assumedly been voluntary. In contrast, this article discusses anti-consumption as a less explicitly political but also less voluntary form of anti-consumption, termed non-consumption. The empirical data consist of nine in-depth interviews with Danish pregnant women and new mothers regarding potentially 'risky' products. The article shows how their avoidance of certain forms of consumption reflects their struggle to perceive themselves-and be perceived by others-as competent mothers(-to-be). Risk is avoided, minimized, modified or balanced against prevailing habits and discourses of womanhood such as the risk of parabens against ideals of beauty when using cosmetic products. The article contributes to the anti-consumption literature by offering insights into the highly normative but less explicitly political field of constrained consumption reflected in the everyday microconsumption practices of Danish pregnant women and new mothers.