City Research Online

Abstract

Addiction is not just an individual or public health issue. It is also embedded in organizational practices. We argue that addiction is engineered through the design of addictive goods and the structuring of habitual patterns of behaviour incentivized by organizations. We conceptualize how organizing sustains addictive behaviours by creating and reinventing what we term new objects and subjects of addiction. By conceptualizing addiction as an organizational phenomenon, we foreground its embeddedness in institutional, technological and economic arrangements. We then set out an agenda for further research on its organizational dimensions and the mechanisms that sustain and mitigate it.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© The Author(s) 2026. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
Publisher Keywords:	addiction, capitalism, control, digital platforms, technology, work
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine > RA0421 Public health. Hygiene. Preventive Medicine
Departments:	Bayes Business School
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

Export

Downloads