SOC433H5 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Sick Building Syndrome, Mass Hysteria, Occupational Safety And Health
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Michelle Murphy. 2006. Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty. Environmental
Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers.
Introduction
• What had been unconnected, diverse bodily occurrences cohered into an event. Individual
symptoms joined the crowd of similarities and became linked in a chain of repetition: in the
building
• At other buildings, in other cities, strangely similar chains of events occurred.
• The crowd, linked by symptoms, declared an occupational health problem. A name circulated,
under which all these differences coalesced: sick building syndrome.
Becoming a sick building syndrome
• Before 1980, sick building syndrome did not exist.
• In order to become ‘‘sick,’’ a certain kind of o≈ce building had to come into existence.
• Buildings were remodelled for the ideal conditions that could maintain technology such as
computers and printers
• Sick building syndrome was a problem only possible in conditions of relative privilege and
luxury that characterized Reagan-era America.
• It captured those minor health complaints only foregrounded when larger dangers receded.
• At the same time, sick building syndrome expressed the sense that privilege was imperfect, even
threatened.
• Yet during the 1970s, a resurgent feminism and a newly articulated environmentalism spawned
an office-workers movement that made occupational health, and particularly chemical exposures,
one of its concerns.
• Collected survey data to address the concerns
• The new physical space of office buildings, combined with anxiety over the buildup of tiny toxic
hazards, led to protests that in turn triggered government investigations of office buildings.
• Health investigators could not detect a chemical exposure
• In the absence of a definitive cause, some experts claimed that women, who made up the vast
majority of office workers, were experiencing ‘‘mass hysteria’’ triggered by stress and facilitated
by a feminine coping style or even by menstrual irregularities.
o Was argued to be the cause of the sick building syndrome
• Workers’ compensation administrators and health insurance companies, in turn, balked at
covering a health problem that could not be made to fit traditional explanations
• A new kind of chemical exposure— indoor pollution—had been identified, not from a discovery
in a medical laboratory or clinic but from changes in the ways ordinary people created knowledge
about and experienced their everyday environment
• scientists, doctors, and activists, joined by experts sponsored by the tobacco industry, held that
indoor pollution was in fact a significant worry, perhaps even more so than industrial pollution
o there was a difference of opinion from different people within the same fields
• Sick building syndrome exemplifies the ways exposures became part of everyday American life.
• protests over the environmental conditions in nonindustrial workplaces happened
contemporaneously with accusations of gender oppression and clashes over women’s appropriate
place.
• A typical definition of sick building syndrome depicted it as a diversity of ill health e√ects,
mostly minor and associated with a building, for which no specific cause was found.
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