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The large number of international medical graduates (IMGs) working in Australia, and many other countries around the world, has received significant attention from the media, governments and academia. These institutions utilise a number of classificatory schemes in order to categorise IMGs. Such classification is often stigmatising, yet goes largely unquestioned. In this paper I show that the 'official naming' of IMGs in Australia, as well as the naming of IMGs by staff in hospitals, is historically, politically and socially produced. Following Bourdieu's call to also study how the classified classify, the paper goes on to examine ways in which IMGs name and categorise each other, drawing on ethnographic research. I argue that IMGs use classification themselves, strategically, in order to modify their marginalised position within the 'social space' of the hospital. The article questions taken-for-granted assumptions about classified groups such as IMGs and leaves an opening for change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explaining the trajectory of Australian health policies over the last century requires an analysis of different political regimes and their dreams of order for managing risk. Crook reverses the Beckian axiom that risk is the unintended outcome of the failure of industrial societies, arguing for an understanding of risk within a Foucauldian and Actor Network Theory of governmentality. Risk becomes a mechanism for the realisation of different dreams of order. The welfare state was the risk management mechanism of organised capitalism. Individual aspirations of reflexive individuals form the risk management mechanism of neo-liberal regimes. As competing risk discourses destabilise the field of maternity care, key actors (including doctors, midwives, women and policymakers) form themselves into neo-traditional communities in ongoing struggles to have their risk claims institutionalised within policies and protocols that further legitimise their interests. These struggles around risk and power are evident in recent debates over maternity policy in the context of the 2009 Maternity Services Review and the policy aftermath. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]