Virtue and health--finding meaning and joy in working life

The perspective of this investigation is the humanistic caring tradition of caring science where caritas motive, i.e. charity and love, constitutes the basic motive and suffering the basic category of caring, i.e. Eriksson's theory of caritative caring. The concept of virtue is used in accordance with Aristotle's theory of virtue and fragments of theory are added to the study from Arendt. The aim of the study was to investigate the meaning of virtues for worker's health and to develop a theoretical model of the inner health domains. The investigation comprises an empirical study using focus-group interviews for the collection of data. The participants were 16 employees, in four focus groups, in the wood-processing industry. The study was conducted from September 1999 to January 2000. Hermeneutical interpretation has been used in the search for a deeper understanding of the connection between virtue and health in working life. Abduction is the conclusion method, which is used in this study. The result is presented at four levels of interpretation and the final findings constitutes four theses which comprise the virtues of pride, generosity, love and honesty as important in working life and a theoretical model comprising three dimensions: the innermost dimension, the middle dimension and the outer dimension. These dimensions reflect health as becoming. By means of virtues it is possible to find the way to the inner domains of health. Pride as a virtue and how it is heeded at work, is decisive in determining whether health becomes discernable in working life and the value, i.e. found in pride is decisive when it comes to the employee's conception of the meaning of work. The study shows that the connection between health and virtue is important to recognize. This approach points out underlying values that effects worker's health.