The Algorithmisation of Well-Being Promotion: Towards a Selective Paternalism

This chapter provides a theoretical contribution regarding the implications of adopting algorithms for monitoring workers’ health and well-being as a different form of control of their employers. Through a literature review and adopting an anti-deterministic view of the phenomenon within a theoretical framework informed by the STS approach, the chapter shows that the algorithmisation of workers’ health and well-being connects to the emergence of a selective form of paternalistic leadership. The proposed concept of selective paternalism points out how initiatives that challenge individual lifestyles and personal health needs and beliefs reinforce the introduction of the principle of selectiveness in the paternalistic style of leadership, diverging from the “duty” of inclusivity that characterised paternalistic employers. However, we argue, that the STS concepts of “affordance” and “appropriation” together allow us to see how employees and employers are not passive agents in front of algorithms, as they can appropriate them, thus leading to different potential interactional configurations between humans and algorithms.