Mair2011
| Mair2011 | |
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| BibType | ARTICLE |
| Key | Mair2011 |
| Author(s) | Michael Mair |
| Title | Deconstructing behavioural classifications: tobacco control, 'professional vision' and the tobacco user as a site of governmental intervention |
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| Tag(s) | models of the tobacco user, the new public health, health and government, EMCA |
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| Year | 2011 |
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| Journal | Critical Public Health |
| Volume | 21 |
| Number | 2 |
| Pages | 129–140 |
| URL | Link |
| DOI | 10.1080/09581596.2010.529423 |
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Abstract
In this article, I examine a defining feature of the ‘new public health’: the (re)construction of health-related phenomena in behavioural terms. While the ‘behavioural turn’ within epidemiology has had far-reaching implications for the way in which public health problems as a whole are conceptualised, including, significantly, obesity and alcohol (mis)use, here I explore how the new public health works up its behavioural objects using the example of tobacco use. Beginning with the work of counting smokers, I trace the emergence and consolidation of a standard model for identifying and measuring tobacco-related harm, a model, I argue, that has been extended so that tobacco use itself can be treated in disease terms. As I show with reference to an example of contemporary public health research practice in the UK, this extension is problematic because it establishes a depoliticised view of the public's health that concentrates on individuals, recast as bundles of problem behaviours, at the expense of any examination of the social, cultural and economic circumstances in which those individuals live. Epidemiological research of this kind, with its core message that behavioural problems require behavioural solutions, relies on close alliances between the health sector and decision-makers more broadly. Under these conditions, the point at which research ends and government begins is often difficult to locate. I conclude by arguing that we should pay greater attention to the epidemiological practices used to transform the behaviour of the tobacco user, like that of the eater or drinker, into a site of governmental intervention.
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