Modernity, Public Health, and Health Promotion

Abstract

Reflecting on the nature of evidence produced with regards to health promotion, one of us (McQueen, 2001) recently argued that health promotion could not yet claim the status of a scientific discipline. One symptom for this, McQueen noted, was the absence of a largely agreed upon corpus of theoretical concepts and propositions that would rally those who are engaged in the discourse or in the practice of health promotion. In established science, such a corpus makes the content of introductory textbooks and as a consequence of the large consensus about the objects and methods that constitute a discipline, the table of contents of most contemporaneous introductory textbooks are very similar. Such consensus and the accompanying uniform content are still lacking in health promotion, and it is certainly not our intention that this book should become one. Quite the contrary, our aim with this book is to offer for discussion a theoretical perspective for health promotion. Such a theoretical perspective, we argue, is necessary to support exploring the role of health promotion in contemporary society and to inform our response to the challenges facing the development of the health promotion knowledge base and practice. These are necessary conditions if health promotion is to evolve into a profession (see Pelikan, Chapter 6).