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This paper argues for the importance of a broad sociological engagement with bioethics. It begins by considering why sociologists should be interested in bioethics and then goes on to explore the cognitive critique of bioethics developed by ethnographers. Some of these authors have also suggested that a more robust bioethics might emerge through the incorporation of the tools of ethnographic analysis. In this paper, it is argued that this is an important claim which needs to be analysed further and that Foucault's concept of discursive formations provides a useful framework for doing so. Once bioethics is redescribed as a discursive formation, the paper explores the challenges and obstacles that sociology and ethnography face in their attempt to open up a space for themselves in bioethics. The paper concludes by suggesting that sociologists and ethnographers need to reflect on the ways in which they might democratically secure legitimacy for their own claims in the field of social ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last thirty years, it has regularly been asserted that the incidence of anorexia nervosa is increasing. The paper examines the background of this idea, traces its origins, and analyses the process whereby it became widely accepted within the medical and sociological literature. The study is based upon a citation list of all the epidemiological studies of anorexia nervosa with publication dates between 1960 and the end of 1990, which has been used to identify the most important publications on the prevalence and incidence of the disease. Scrutiny of the content of these key publications has allowed us to follow the emergence, and then the partial break-up, of a broad consensus - involving clinical psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, as well as medical sociologists and historians around the assertion that anorexia nervosa was increasing in incidence. In the course of this historical reconstruction, four distinctive patterns of citation behaviour were revealed. The paper also examines the changing nature of the explanation offered for the putative rise in the numbers of sufferers and suggests reasons why such a perspective upon the disease was widely supported by clinicians and by a variety of other commentators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the relationship between class, health and life-styles, and to what extent does health-related knowledge influence subsequent behaviour? These issues have been a source of considerable debate for medical sociologists and others concorned with promoting 'healthier' life-styles over the years, Yet despite a wealth of empirical material, there has been little attempt to theorise this relationship between class, health and lifestyles and the associated issues of structure and agency, accounts and action it raises. This paper attempts to rectify this lacuna through a critical discussion of the work of Pierre Bourdieu, and its relevance to the class, health and life-styles debate. In particular, attention is paid to Bourdieu's analysis of the logic of practice, his concepts of habitus and bodily hexis, and the search for social distinction in the construction of (health-related) life-styles. The paper concludes with a critical commentary on these issues and the relative merits of Bourdieu's analysis for the sociology of health and illness. It is argued that despite certain limitations regarding issues of agency and 'choice', Bourdieu's analysis does indeed shed important light on the health and lifestyles debate, and that further bridge-building exercises of this nature between mainstream theory and the sociology of health and illness are both necessary and fruitful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidence based health care has attracted considerable interest from NHS commissioners, public health specialists and sociologists as both a rational approach to decision making and as representing an ideological shift in health care. This paper explores the social construction of 'evidence' in one arena, that of the work of Accident Alliances. Interviews with key participants and observations of meetings suggest a high level of consensus that evidence was important for their work in terms of strategic decision making, operational planning and evaluation. However, evidence was framed differently across the professions and organisations involved in the alliances. Rather than being a neutral tool used to inform decision making, evidence was both constructed through professional practice and contributed to the construction of professional identity. The formal advocacy of evidence based interventions makes explicit a number of potential conflicts in inter-agency working, and Accident Alliances provide an illuminating case study of how these are managed in day-to-day working in health care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article author comments on views of social scientists Michael Kelly and David Field on a paper on medical sociology and chronic illness written by him. Analyzing both the sociologists views, it is found that they suggest, self and identity are core aspects of everyday experience which the onset of illness and the change in bodily functioning profoundly affects. It is this interplay play between self and identity, which they argue, provides a "theoretical bridge" to "manage" the relation between biological and social facts. The author points out that the arguments given by Kelly and Field's article are not new, and were already there in various literatures on chronic illness, disability and stigmatization. Much of their arguments seem to be a rehearsal of very familiar arguments, albeit this time with more than a nod in the direction of biology and the physicality of the human body. The author concludes by proposing an extension of Kelly and Field's argument about the body, self and identity.

Mastery of esoteric knowledge is one of the central features assigned by sociologists to fully professionalised service occupations, together with an orientation towards public service. There are, nevertheless, different views about the best way in which this education and socialisation can be provided for new recruits for practitioner roles. Some maintain that the university provides an ideal training ground. Critics of this view, however, call for a rejection of 'university diploma mills' and a return to the type of apprenticeship socialisation common during the premodern era. This paper tests the usefulness of these perspectives in understanding the occupational socialisation of Newfoundland and Labrador midwives. Three major styles of training- traditional apprenticeship, vocational schooling and university education - can be discerned. In comparison to both apprenticeship and academic styles of occupational socialisation, only vocational training nicely blended the art and science of midwifery to produce competent and committed professionals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an overview of writer Rue Bucher's professional career in sociology. Rue's professional career in sociology began when, as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, she joined the National Opinion Research Center Disaster Team in 1952. This experience provided her with the data to write a thesis and one of her first publications, a paper entitled, Blame and Hostility in Disasters, which was published without revision by the American Journal of Sociology in 1957. In reading the body of Rue's work one cannot miss her fascination with the idea that the process of socialization exhibits the same features whether the person undergoing socialization is being inducted into the role of mental patient, graduate student in biochemistry or psychiatrist. The most clearly elaborated statement that Rue made in this context was that the structure of the organization in which the socialization process takes place is the factor which has the greatest effect on the outcome of the process.