By Mark Cieslik,
Northumbria University and David Bartram, University of Leicester.
The growing interest in happiness and well-being?
The contemporary
interest in well-being began in the 1950s with the World Health Organisation
developing new ways of measuring and promoting international development. This
was the beginning of efforts to include notions such as quality of life and
subjective well-being into existing approaches of development that had
emphasised economic growth and prosperity as key indicators of social progress. Recent decades have seen much debate and
research into the attributes of a ‘good life’ and the ‘good society’ – how these
would be experienced subjectively and how they might be created objectively by
public policy. Many governments now
conduct national well-being surveys, keen to explore the impact on subjective well-being
of changes in society particularly in employment, technology and family
formation.
What is Happiness?
Though the idea of
happiness seems a simple and ubiquitous feature of modern societies,
commentators point to various ways of understanding well-being. We can
distinguish between popular notions of happiness as personal experiences of
good feeling (joy and pleasure in contrast to suffering), more ‘scientific’
concepts such as subjective well-being that refer to the balance of positive
and negative experiences we have (and reflect on) and finally objective or
structural features of well-being such as income, family structure, community
services and housing. Researchers (usually employing survey techniques) then
try to correlate the structural features of societies with how these features
are experienced by individuals. Hence well-being surveys from the British
Office of National Statistics can tell us about variations in well-being by
region of the UK and how these vary with certain characteristics such as
health, education and employment status. These sorts of surveys usually offer
us unremarkable insights into the nature of well-being – that higher incomes,
satisfying employment, good health and secure family relationships (for example)
are all important to happiness. The British economist Richard Layard has
documented these trends in well-being research, championing policies that
support families and communities and promote good mental health.
Critical Approaches to Happiness and Well-being
These trends have sparked much critical debate about the usefulness of “well-being” for evaluating social progress and the lives of individuals. Some social scientists are sceptical of the recent interest in well-being and happiness, suggesting that this trend reflects the individualism or even the narcissism of the age. Thus happiness and subjective well-being have been colonised by corporations and are now used to make us feel insecure about our lives – we all have to try and be happy, and popular routes to well-being involve ever greater consumption as a path to happiness. Some instead suggest that traditional concepts of inequality, poverty or disadvantage still offer greater insights into the nature of modern societies and the life chances of citizens than a focus on well-being. Others point to the crude way that well-being is understood and employed in surveys – the impossibility of capturing complex emotions and experiences with simple questions and scales. It is not obvious that responses from individuals about their happiness can be aggregated to create maps about the relative well-being of different areas of the UK. Some researchers therefore call for more complex survey techniques that can grasp the different ways that well-being is experienced at different levels – from individuals and families up to communities and regional processes.
Wellbeing as everyday practice
An alternative to
survey research into well-being is to explore the ways that happiness is
grounded in the everyday activities of individuals. Some researchers employ
ethnographic and interview techniques to discern the different ways that well-being
is experienced and pursued in different domains such as through families,
partners, employment, leisure and friendships. Such approaches reflect the way Greek
philosophers such as Aristotle suggested that happiness can have fleeting
personal dimensions such as merry-making (Hedonia) yet also be rooted in more
enduring and biographical projects that imply ‘working at happiness’
(Eudaimonia). A number of researchers are now investigating how happiness,
though shaped by wider structural features in society, can also be a practical
everyday accomplishment where individuals are often struggling to navigate
their way through the challenges of life hoping to flourish as best they can. The
happiness of individuals can reflect the sorts of resources they are able to
mobilise (such as social networks and income) and also the sorts of decisions
they make; likewise, different emotions, values and interests can inform the choices
people make in their daily lives. Very often our efforts around well-being are
focused on working at the happiness of others; care giving, compassion and altruism
are still significant features of our lives. Thus these micro approaches to
well-being, though appearing to focus on personal projects, also consider the
important ways that well-being works at an inter-personal level – the notion of
‘social happiness’.
The promise of happiness research?
Andrew Sayer (2011)
has recently suggested that our pursuit of well-being is something that we all
do – it is something that really matters to us all – yet is something that is
often overlooked by social scientists fixated on the pathologies of modern
societies. The promise of a more sustained critical engagement with well-being –
how it is experienced and can be promoted – is that it offers us a way of rethinking
some of the major challenges we face today. What constitutes satisfaction with
life or quality of life and how public policy can deliver these are fundamental
questions in contemporary societies. At
a time of austerity and hardship it might seem bizarre to research happiness, but
this is perhaps precisely the time to explore what it means to be content and
fulfilled and indeed to flourish.
In recent decades we
have had increasingly sterile debates between Left and Right about how to
recast the contract between the individual and the state. Growing inequalities,
the powerlessness of citizens and the rising influence of corporations all
suggest that there are limits to what markets can achieve (Sandel, 2012). Yet some
of our efforts to regulate markets appear ineffectual and suggestions of a return
to state management of services appear anachronistic for many. As we find
ourselves caught between market or state systems, can a sustained analysis of
well-being and how individuals and communities flourish help us achieve a
better understanding of what makes a good society and a good life?
References
Sandel, M. (2012) What Money Cannot Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. London: Allen Lane.
Sayer, A. (2011) Why
Things Matter to People: Social Science, Values and Ethical Life. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Read more about happiness and well-being in the Sociological Research Online special section, published in May 2014.
