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Modern societies and organizations are characterized by multiple kinds of observations, systems, or rationalities, rather than singular identities and clear hierarchies. This holds true for healthcare where we find a range of different perspectives – from medicine to education, from science to law, from religion to politics – brought together in different types of arrangements. This innovative volume explores how this polycontexturality plays out in the healthcare arena. Drawing on systems theory, and Luhmann’s theory of social systems as communicative systems in particular, the contributors investigate how things – drugs, for example – and bodies are observed and constructed in di...
Recent studies into the experiences and failures of health care services, along with the rapid development of patient advocacy, consumerism and pressure groups have led historians and social scientists to engage with the issue of the medical complaint. As expressions of dissatisfaction, disquiet and failings in service provision, past complaining is a vital antidote to progressive histories of health care. This book explores what has happened historically when medicine generated complaints. This multidisciplinary collection comprises contributions from leading international scholars and uses new research to develop a sophisticated understanding of the development of medicine and the role of ...
Reproductive medicine has been very successful at developing new therapies in recent years and people having difficulties conceiving have more options available to them than ever before. These developments have led to a new institutional landscape emerging and this innovative volume explores how health and social structures are being developed and reconfigured to take into account the increased use of assisted reproductive technologies, such as IVF treatments. Using Sweden as a central case study, it explores how the process of institutionalizing new assisted reproductive technologies includes regulatory agencies, ethical committees, political bodies and discourses, scientific communities, patient and activists groups, and entrepreneurial activities in the existing clinics and new entrants to the industry. It draws on new theoretical developments in institutional theory and outlines how health innovations are always embedded in social relations including ethical, political, and financial concerns. This book will be of interest to advanced students and academics in health management, science and technology studies, the sociology of health and illness and organisational theory.
This Book develops a novel and innovative methodological framework for operationalising Henri Lefebvre’s work for empirical research on the U.S. city. Building on ethnographic research on Chicago’s South Side, Tilman Schwarze explores the current situation of urbanisation and urban life in the U.S. city through a critical reading and application of Lefebvre’s writings on space, everyday life, the urban, the state, and difference. Focusing on territorial stigmatisation, public housing transformation, and urban redevelopment, this book makes an important contribution to critical urban scholarship, foregrounding the relevance and applicability of Henri Lefebvre’s work for geographical and sociological research on urban politics and everyday life.
Giving Blood represents a new agenda for blood donation research. It explores the diverse historical and contemporary undercurrents that influence how blood donation takes place, and the social meanings that people attribute to the act of giving blood. Drawing from empirical studies conducted in the United States, Canada, France, Australia, China, India, Latin America and Africa, the book’s chapters turn our attention to the evolution of blood donation worldwide, examining: the impact of technology advances on blood collection practices the shifting approaches to donor recruitment and retention the governance and policy issues associated with the establishment of blood clinics the political and legal challenges of regulating blood systems. This innovative examination moves the focus from individual explanations of rates of blood donation to a social, structural explanation. It will appeal to international scholars and students working in the areas of sociology, medical anthropology, health care, public policy, socio-legal studies, comparative politics, organizational management, health and illness, the history of medicine, and public health ethics.
Medical therapy, research and technology enable us to make our bodies, or parts of them, available to others in an increasing number of ways. This is the case in organ, tissue, egg and sperm donation as well as in surrogate motherhood and clinical research. Bringing together leading scholars working on the ethical, social and cultural aspects of such bodily exchanges, this cutting-edge book develops new ways of understanding them. Bodily Exchanges, Bioethics and Border Crossing both probes the established giving and selling frameworks for conceptualising bodily exchanges in medicine, and seeks to develop and examine another, less familiar framework: that of sharing. A framework of sharing ca...
Bringing together an international selection of leading scholars and representatives from patients’ organizations, this comprehensive collection explores the interaction between civil society groups and biomedical science, technology development, and research politics. This volume is an important reference for academics and researchers with an interest in the sociology of health and illness, science and technology studies, the sociology of knowledge or healthcare management and research, as well as medical researchers and those involved with health-related civil society organizations.
The nursing process generally is understood as key element of professional nursing care in Germany. This study follows this argument back to the introduction of the nursing process in the 1970s and 1980s. At that time, the German healthcare system underwent dramatic changes and economic reorganization, which can be understood as the emergence of the neoliberal rationale in Germany. The argument of cost explosion was used to restructure hospitals into enterprises that were to operate based on the logic of the market. Its cybernetic logic made the nursing process an ideal instrument to restructure nursing care. Perspectives of governmentality and critical accounting reveal the nursing process as an accounting tool which has made nursing calculable. And while German nurses valued its potential for professionalization, the findings suggest that a newly constituted accountable nursing vocation can instead be considered as de-professionalizing.
The Routledge Handbook of European Sociology provides over forty original, groundbreaking state-of-the-art accounts, each expert contribution teasing out the distinctively European features of the sociological theme it explores. The Handbook is divided in four parts: intellectual and institutional settings, regional variations, thematic variations, and European concerns.
Pluralism has become the defining characteristic of many modern societies. Not only a plurality of individual and social claims and activities gain impacts on societal life. A creative pluralism of institutions and their norms profoundly shape our moral commitments and character – notably the family, the market, the media, and systems of law, religion, politics, research, education, health care, and defense. In the theoretical, empirical, and historical contributions to this volume, specialists on medicine, medical ethics, psychology, theology and health care discuss the many challenges that major transformations in their areas of expertise pose to the communication and orientation in late modern pluralistic societies. Contributors come from Germany, the USA and Australia.