Review

Can HP be PC?

The Sociology of health promotion: critical analyses of lifestyle, consumption and risk
Robin Bunton, Sarah Nettleton, Roger Burrows (eds) Routledge, 1995, £13.99

This stimulating collection of essays is fascinating and frustrating by turns. While some of the contributions feel a little tired and all too familiar, there is enough here which is lively, provocative and insightful to make the volume as a whole thoroughly worthwhile.

Health promotion is a puzzling endeavour in many ways, not least in the difficulty its practitioners have in clarifying what it is about. It seems to face a dilemma: avoid politics and lay claim to a technical expertise, and end up a ‘health educator’; or become a political animal, and risk losing any ‘professional’ identity.

Most of the contributors to this book regard health promotion as having primarily an individualist focus, and naturally (being sociological), they castigate it for ignoring the social. But many HP departments are known for their socio-political sophistication, and few critiques address this politically savvy HP.

One that does, with great verve, is the paper by Michael Kelly and Bruce Charlton, which offers an insightful analysis of some of HP’s underlying assumptions. Kelly and Charlton point out that HP has become a political campaign in which health is a moral right, yet it lacks (and possibly avoids) any coherent political philosophy or social theory, leaving it open to continual attack from both right and left.

Other papers explore the pervasive idea of ‘risk’, and the paradox of our understanding of accidents as both unpredictable, yet predictable.