Koempel, A. (2025). “We didn’t used to be corporate medicine”: The jobification of United States healthcare. Human Organization, 1–12
https://doi.org/10.1080/00187259.2025.2519790
Abstract
In this article I introduce the concept of “jobification” to examine how primary care medicine has transformed from a perceived calling into mechanistic, profit-driven work. Through qualitative research with family physicians in the United States, I explore how the imposition of market and legal logics on the health logic of physicians results in the loss of vocation and the increase of moral injury and burnout. I further elaborate and theorize this by drawing on Weber’s analysis of a “calling” and Foucault’s concept of pastoral power. Institutional programs aimed at improving wellness and self-care recast the latter as under an individual’s direct control, failing to address structural causes that create gaps between physicians and patients. Collective responses to jobification, such as physician unionization efforts, can instigate the process of reframing self-care from individualized coping strategies to collective resistance against current healthcare power structures.
Keywords:
Jobification, self-care, proletarianization, isolationism, alienation, providers, professionals, professionalism
Foucault News 