ORGANISATIONS THAT MAKE YOU SICK HAVE ALWAYS EXISTED, but the mass pathology associated with work and organisation is a new discovery. In a twenty five year long research project that began with a study of health and longevity among Whitehall public servants, Michael Marmot found that autonomy, security, the amount of control that people have over their lives, and above all, place in the organisational hierarchy, are critical factors in the prevalence of ill health. (Marmot, 2004) Marmot's original study found, contrary to expectations, that "it was not the case that people in high stress jobs had a higher risk of heart attack, rather it went exactly the other way: people at the bottom of the hierarchy had a higher risk of heart attacks". (Marmot, 2002) In extending his initial findings Marmot found that the lower the place of the public servant in the hierarchy, the higher the risk of all the major causes of death.
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