On the Social and Material Lives of Health Concepts in the Wild

In the last decade, Positive Health has taken the Netherlands by storm, having been widely adopted in Dutch healthcare and the public sector at large. But does this new concept deliver on its promises? In their chapter on Positive Health, Van der Linden and Schermer tackle this question by approaching it as a conceptual engineering project. Positive Health, they conclude, ultimately falls short in achieving its aims. But given this disappointing verdict, how can the new health concept’s success be explained? In this short reflection, I draw on my ethnographic fieldwork into Positive Health and key works in Science and Technology Studies to gain insight in the concept’s eager uptake. As I demonstrate, following Positive Health ‘in the wild’ affords a deeper understanding of its social and material life. This not only helps explain the concept’s widespread adoption, but also opens up new vistas for conceptual engineering as a scholarly approach.