Re-organising wellbeing: Contexts, critiques and contestations of dominant wellbeing narratives

Wellbeing has emerged as an important discourse of management and organisation. Practices of wellbeing are located in concrete organisational arrangements and shaped by power relations built upon embedded, intersecting inequalities and therefore require critical evaluation. Critical evaluation is essential if we are to reorganise wellbeing to move beyond critique and actively contest dominant wellbeing narratives in order to reshape the contexts in which wellbeing can be fulfilled. The COVID-19 pandemic under which this special issue took shape, provides various examples of how practices continue to be shaped by existing narratives of wellbeing. The pandemic also constituted a far-reaching shock that gave collective pause to consider to the extent to which work is really organised to realise wellbeing and opened up potential to think differently. The seven papers included in the special issue reveal the problematic and uneven way in which wellbeing is pursued and examine possibilities to imagine and realise more radical practices of wellbeing that can counter the way in which ill-being is produced by the organisation of labour. © The Author(s) 2023.

[Prevention of young people's suicide: strengthen resilience and focus on mental health problems]

It is highly tragic when a young person commits suicide. Van Vuuren et al. show trends among self-reported suicidal thoughts and suicidal attempts among over 25.000 Amsterdam children, aged 13 and 14, of different educational levels and ethnic backgrounds, between 2010 and 2015. They advise policy makers to base their choice of suicide prevention measures on the information about trends. In this commentary, we state that policy makers should refrain from doing so, because of the unclear relation between highly prevalent self-reported suicidal thoughts and attempts and extremely rare actual suicide, because of negligence of cultural aspects of suicide in handling the evidence and because trends based on data from 2010-2015 are useless when devising policies in the midst of the covid-19 crisis. We advise policy makers to focus on strengthening young people's resilience and on the prevention of mental health problems instead.