**9. Conclusion**

Our aim in this paper has been to take a fresh look at the pediatric obesity crisis across disciplines, with special attention to what insights from organization studies might bring to bear. There is debate about whether the food industry can be a socially responsible partner in addressing the obesity epidemic [67, 68]. More broadly, we urge attention to whether organi‐ zation studies scholars can broker a move away from persistently individualistic explanations and urge corporations to play a positive role in re‐imagining lives, livelihoods, and health. Advances in molecular biology and medicine are pointing toward factors beyond individual behaviors. We argue that new prevention and treatment measures will only be seriously implemented in obesogenic and diabetogenic institutional contexts where individual choice models are not supreme.

likely to support adults and do not typically extend to the children of working parents. Such

We propose that the most important role of corporations for stemming pediatric obesity is their structural role as employers. As employers, corporations create working conditions for the parents of young children, which in turn affect parental time and financial resources for supporting their children's diet and exercise [63, 64]. Work practices can be a good place to look for sources of inequalities [65]. Long and nonstandard hours of work affect parenting, such that pediatric obesity might be regarded as an externality of current work arrangements. An externality is a factor that causes harm, that a corporation exports, that no corporation is rationally motivated to curb on its own, but that later impinges negatively on all corporations and societies collectively; pollution is an example. Considering pediatric obesity as a negative externality of corporations might reframe policy debates, particularly toward supporting more

We emphasize the importance of looking at the corporate role in creating obesogenic employ‐ ment conditions. Indeed, employment and consumption patterns may be linked, when taking

"[I]nstead of paying workers well enough to allow them to buy things like cars, as Henry Ford proposed to do, companies like Wal‐Mart and McDonald's pay their workers so poorly that they can afford only the cheap, low‐quality food these companies sell, creating a kind of nonvirtuous circle driving down both wages and the quality of food. The advent of fast food (and cheap food in general) has in

The pediatric obesity epidemic will, in turn, affect corporations. The future workforce will be less healthy and robust, and the children of workers in low‐wage jobs, who are statistically most likely to end up themselves in low‐wage jobs, may not be fit to undertake the heavy lifting or long hours expected. In addition, public opinion is shifting, such that there is greater awareness of food issues and their sources. Corporations should be welcomed into the varied

Why might corporations be reluctant partners in this project? The answer requires looking at power. Status quo employment arrangements favor top executives and shareholders. Merito‐ cratic ideals and the ethos of individualism can be invoked to legitimate inequalities from which corporate leaders benefit. Shifting toward structural explanations for outcomes, whether income or obesity, is a radical move. It will require some radical redistribution of employment opportunities, incomes, and resources, and thereby, it is likely to be met with

Our aim in this paper has been to take a fresh look at the pediatric obesity crisis across disciplines, with special attention to what insights from organization studies might bring to

effect, subsidized the decline of family incomes in America."

alliances of stakeholders working on the pediatric obesity crisis.

programs are also rare in low‐wage workplaces.

204 Adiposity - Omics and Molecular Understanding

remunerative and stable work conditions.

a broader view of food systems [66]:

resistance.

**9. Conclusion**

We close by considering how the overarching analytical approach to "agency and structure" that we have urged in this chapter can assist in tackling three persistent myths in the realm of obesity.


These insights, anchored in scientific research, should trigger new thinking about obesity. But individualistic and behavior modification approaches still offer a dominant narrative, and working conditions in corporations still hamper many people even from attempting alternative individualistic or family behaviors. The tools of scholars working at the intersection of disciplines—including the study of corporations—can help explain why these myths are so deeply culturally embedded and so obdurate.
