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This paper examines the citation counts of papers published in the first 25 years of the Sociology of Health and Illness. According to this measure only a small number of papers have made a major impact on the discipline of sociology of health and illness and an analysis of these select papers identifies some common themes. In particular, ‘successful’ papers have provided important theoretical constructs for the field while exploration of aspects of identity has been a recurrent focus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides insights on the urgent need for transformative responses in health and social care services due to challenges such as aging populations, chronic illnesses, infrastructure underinvestment, and workforce shortages. It presents papers that examine different aspects of these transformations, including the adoption of single-handed care.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including relationships between power, space and dominant discourses; importance of structural dimensions of power between professionals and patients; and role of environment in healthcare services.

The article discusses information about the 27th Sociology of Health and Illness Monograph. Topics covered include the emergence of the construct of overdiagnosis, the impact of diagnostic, prognostic, and treatment uncertainty on the lay-professional interface, and organisational and health system level responses to uncertainty.

By focusing on the experiences of employees living with coeliac disease as evidenced in UK employment tribunal cases, this paper interrogates the way practices of exclusion are performed in legal and organisational contexts that purport to promote values of inclusion. In paying attention to how differences are constructed and negotiated, the paper unpacks the way organisational practices mobilise an array of workplace mechanisms to produce complex dynamics of exclusion. Applying Laclau and Mouffe’s logics of equivalence and difference, we show how questionable impulses and practices emerge in a workplace environment characterised by unclarity and vagueness. One impulse, for example, involves privatising and individualising the condition of employees with coeliac disease, giving rise to patronising and stigmatising attitudes that can turn them into victims. However, we also identify workplace mechanisms countering these tendencies, which can underpin forms of collective support in the struggle for recognition. Our study thus contributes to the body of sociological literature that pays attention to health‐related workplace injustices by challenging the purported promotion of health‐based inclusion through a focus on tribunal cases, leading to suggestions for further research into the way medical conditions are theorised and ‘lived’ at work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper intervenes in the dichotomous debate on the 'privatisation' of the UK's National Health Service (NHS). Whilst research suggests that involving private‐sector actors and principles deviates from the founding aims of the NHS to deliver equitable healthcare for all, the opposing argument to 'keep our NHS public' also limits understanding and alternative possibilities. Through focusing on maintaining overarching structures, these campaigns fail to address everyday medical practices that have long been critiqued by those allied with the sociology of health and illness. This paper draws on feminist critiques of public/private to expand the structural economic lens of mainstream political debates and explore how multiple forms of economic, social, cultural, and symbolic capital, operate in everyday healthcare practices. Through an historically‐informed ethnographic exploration of routine hip replacements, I find that capital itself emerges through relations between people and things, and that public/private boundaries play an integral role in forming these relations to instil value on particular patients and forms of labour, demarcating what kind of healthcare is given to whom. I therefore suggest future action should focus on assembling healthcare relations beyond the dualism of public/private categories, to create multiple safe places and relations for all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article identifies the health of the worker as a third source of labour power indeterminacy to be added to the indeterminacy of labour effort and the indeterminacy of labour mobility. The paper clearly differentiates worker health from effort as a distinct source of labour power indeterminacy—something that cannot be guaranteed and that varies for an individual over time. It considers the relationship between worker health as a new source of indeterminacy and the two extant sources of labour power indeterminacy, focussing on the way in which health moderates the relationship between effort and output. The paper also considers the way in which worker health investment moderates the indeterminacy of labour effort and labour mobility, independently of its impact on the health of the worker. The paper documents the potential value of worker health investment to the organisation and also considers the boundary conditions for investment in worker health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction to a special section brings together three papers first presented at a panel, 'Medical Professions in South Asia: Historical and Contemporary Analyses', at the 26th European Conference on South Asian Studies, held in Vienna, Austria and online, in July 2021. All three papers deal with aspects of the professionalisation of biomedical doctors in India since its independence in 1947. The authors bring together historical and sociological approaches to illuminate the growth of specialisms, patterns of practitioner–patient interactions and efforts to maintain occupational closure and maintain status in the face of growing challenges. The introduction concludes with a discussion of the relevance of these papers for the sociology of health and illness in India and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this editorial introduction, we explore how digital health is being explored at the intersection of sociology of health and science and technology studies (STS). We suggest that socio‐material approaches and practice theories provide a shared space within which productive tensions between sociology of health and STS can continue. These tensions emerge around the long‐standing challenges of avoiding technological determinism while maintaining a clear focus on the materiality and agency of technologies and recognising enduring sets of relations that emerge in new digital health practices while avoiding social determinism. The papers in this Special Issue explore diverse fields of healthcare (e.g. reproductive health, primary care, diabetes management, mental health) within which heterogenous technologies (e.g. health apps, mobile platforms, smart textiles, time‐lapse imaging) are becoming increasingly embedded. By synthesising the main arguments and contributions in each paper, we elaborate on four key dimensions within which digital technologies create ambivalence and (re)configure health practices. First, promissory digital health highlights contradictory virtues within discourses that configure digital health. Second, (re)configuring knowledge outlines ambivalences of navigating new information environments and handling quantified data. Third, (re)configuring connectivity explores the relationships that evolve through digital networks. Fourth, (re)configuring control explores how new forms of power are inscribed and handled within algorithmic decision‐making in health. We argue that these dimensions offer fruitful perspectives along which digital health can be explored across a range of technologies and health practices. We conclude by highlighting applications, methods and dimensions of digital health that require further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract For almost two decades prior to the election of the New Labour government in 1997, inequalities in health were largely absent from the political debate in Britain. New Labour sought to bring inequalities, and the role of poverty as a ‘root cause’ of ill-health, back on to the public agenda. This paper analyses four key documents (Green and White Papers) laying out their proposals for public health. We explore the shifting emphasis on health inequalities between the four official documents, and between the documents and their associated press release. The paper also analyses how this translated into media coverage. It identifies common themes across the press coverage – such as criticisms about lack of targets – but also shows how coverage varied (e.g. between UK ‘national’ and ‘Scottish’ press). Finally, the study highlights the crucial issue of political context and news timing, illustrating how the English White Paper was overshadowed by other health stories which formed the basis for attacks on the Labour government in general and the Health Minister in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The lack of ethnic diversity in health research participation is a multi‐dimensional problem. Racism and intersectional disadvantage compel us to use racial and ethnic categories to explore health, but race theorists warn that these can be essentialising and pathologising. Yet, the alternative, the pursuit of colour‐blindness, can render the impact of race and ethnicity on health invisible. This paper describes the attempt to recruit an ethnically diverse sample to inform the development of an intervention for stroke patients. The study revealed deep uncertainties and tensions, which we use to re‐examine our own positionalities and perspectives. We focus on the experiences of researchers and participants to show how 'usual' research practices are unwittingly exclusionary and promote 'methodological whiteness' (The British Journal of Sociology, 2017, 68, S214). Calls for greater diversity in research are frequently made, yet health research remains tainted by the use of problematic epistemological starting points, rendering participation by minoritised people uneasy. Medical sociologists, especially those engaged in clinical trials, have a vital role to play in recalibrating health research to attend to ethnicity and race. This requires us to reflect on our practices, to recognise where we are complicit in replicating social inequalities and to actively engage with communities to produce more inclusive research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Patient and public involvement and engagement (PPIE) is an increasingly important component of research conduct to enhance processes and potential for impact, yet is rarely critically interrogated. This paper draws on Foucauldian analysis to highlight the disciplinary powers and tensions arising in PPIE. The paper draws on a nested evaluation interview study with three PPIE members and eight academics, who had been involved in an implementation science study focused on palliative care. PPIE members were involved in the whole study and are co‐authors of this article. Through shared values and commitments to the study, a team culture of equality was developed. Yet while power was dispersed and taken‐up by all team members, in so doing a self‐governance approach within the team was developed. The pace and focus of discussions was at times more subjugating than co‐production. Identities and positions were porous; the simplistic division of ‘academic’ and ‘PPIE’ did not stand up to scrutiny, with an increasing blurring of boundaries as people’s experiences and insights changed over time. Continual, subtle, negotiations of roles, inputs and identities were manifest throughout the project. PPIE in research involves subtle, complex and ongoing disciplinary practices enacted by all members of the team. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conceptualisations of grief have transformed significantly in recent decades, from an experience accepted and expressed in community spaces to a diagnosable clinical phenomenon. Narratives of this transformation tend to focus on grief’s relationship to major depression, or on recent nosological changes. This paper examines the possibility of a new narrative for medicalisation by grounding in the networks of language and power created around ‘grief’ through a critical discourse analysis of psy‐discipline articles (n = 70) published between 1975 and 1995. Focusing on shifts in definitions of, methods used to approach, and rationales motivating study of the experience, it posits that the psy‐disciplines exerted exclusive expertise over grief decades before its creation as a diagnosis. By reconceptualising grief in the terms of psy‐specific symptoms and functional performance and by approaching it with the decontextualising and interventionist methods of an increasingly scientific psy‐discipline, the psy‐community medicalised grief between 1975 and 1995. Identifying neoliberal and other cultural influences shaping this process of medical construction and reconsidering narratives of grief’s history mindful of the powers exerted in medicalisation, this paper establishes that these moments played a critical role in the development of the present’s grief. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As opioid fatalities rise in North America, the need to improve the supports available to those who are dependent on opioids and pregnant has become more urgent. This paper discusses the social organisation of drug treatment supports for those who are pregnant, using Canadian clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) for methadone maintenance treatment (MMT) as a case study. Pregnant patients are a priority population for MMT, both in Canada and internationally; the regulatory bodies that oversee MMT in Canada are the provincial Colleges of Physician and Surgeons and Health Canada. The paper analyses MMT CPGs published by these agencies, comparing their general recommendations to those specific to pregnant patients. We demonstrate that the guidelines address few treatment considerations for pregnant patients, other than improved birth outcomes and child welfare, despite acknowledging their more complex needs. Drawing on social science studies of gender and drugs, we argue that MMT CPGs therefore perpetuate the intensified surveillance and foetal prioritisation that have long generated barriers to care for opiate‐dependent pregnant patients. We also discuss how and why the CPGs ultimately only reinforced these current limitations in the drug treatment sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we, twin sisters, present a joint autoethnographic account of providing end of life care for our mum who had terminal cancer. Using the theoretical framing of performance from Goffman's theory of Dramaturgy, we present the findings from a joint autoethnography, focusing on two key themes: performing emotion work and performing what we conceptualise as 'dignity work'. This paper's contributions are twofold. First, conceptually, this paper offers an important contribution to literature concerned with the sociology of illness, by critically engaging with Goffman's notion of frontstage and backstage performance, applied to the context of home care provided by family carers. The second contribution of this paper is methodological; we promote the under‐utilised approach of a joint autoethnography and argue for its usefulness in the context of end of life care. We contend that the process of writing this paper was emotionally challenging, yet arriving at the final paper, which serves as a legacy of our mum, was cathartic. We argue for the usefulness of written diaries as a backstage arena through which other informal carers can think through, and come to terms with, experiences of death and dying. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the creation of safe spaces in which to explore and challenge dominant negative views of disabled children and young people, this co‐written paper presents unique insight into the meaning and impact upon disabled young people's lives of medical lenses and deficit models of disability. Bodies of work and dominant debates in medical sociology, disability studies and childhood studies have so far largely overlooked the experiences and positioning of disabled children and young people and have rarely involved them in the development or discussion of theory. Drawing on empirical data, and through a series of creative, reflective workshops with a UK‐based disabled young researchers' collective (RIP:STARS), this paper discusses areas of theoretical importance identified by the disabled young researcher collective—the validation of their lives, negotiation of their identity and acceptance in society. The implications, and possibilities, of platforming disabled children and young people's voices in theoretical debates are deliberated and are achieved through the yielding of privileged academic voice and the development of a symbiotic, genuine partnership which resonates with disabled young people and recognises them as experts in their own lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the potential of the perspective of epistemic injustice to reconcile medical sociology's attention to the micro level of experience and interpersonal exchange, and disability studies' focus on the macro level of oppressive structures. The first part of the paper provides an overview of the concept of epistemic injustice and its key instances—testimonial, hermeneutical, and contributory injustice. We also consider previous applications of the concept in the fields of health care and disability, and we contextualise our investigation by discussing key features of postsocialism from the perspective of epistemic injustice. In the second part, we explore specific epistemic injustices experienced by people who use disability support by drawing on interviews and focus groups conducted with parents of disabled children in present‐day Bulgaria. In our conclusion, we revisit our methodological and theoretical points about the potential of epistemic injustice to facilitate mutually beneficial exchanges between medical sociology and disability studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In healthcare settings, patient participation is increasingly adopted as a possible remedy to ill people suffering from 'epistemic injustices' – that is to their unfair harming as knowers. In exploring and interpreting patient participation discourses within the 2013–2018 Dutch Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME)/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) Health Council advisory process, this paper assesses the epistemological emancipatory value of this participatory practice. It reveals that in the analysed case, patient representatives predominantly offer biomedical knowledge about ME/CFS. They frame this condition as primarily somatic, and accordingly, perceive appropriate diagnostic criteria, research avenues and treatment options as quantifiable, objectifiable and explicitly non‐psychogenic. This paper argues that such a dominant biomedical patient participatory practice is ambiguous in terms of its ability to correct epistemic injustices towards ill people. Biomedicalized patient participation may enhance people's credibility and their ability to make sense of their illness, but it may also undermine their valid position within participatory practices as well as lead to (sustaining) biased and reductive ideas about who ill people are and what kind of knowledge they hold. The final section of this paper offers a brief reflection on how to navigate such biomedicalized participatory practices in order to attain more emancipatory ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper draws on Bourdieu's conceptualisation of the symbolic order and his little used concept of ethos in order to gain novel understandings of boundary struggles between nursing and medicine as well as internally in nursing. The constituents of boundary struggles are analysed in the context of healthcare transformation, focusing on organisational, institutional and political boundary undertakings. Changing conditions for boundary demarcations and professionalisation include a preference for evidence‐based knowledge and practice, seen as a remedy against common problems in health care. The paper shows how nurses use the changes in 'the space of possible professionalisation' in their struggle for professionalisation when they expand their scope of practice and embark on what is conceptualised as a curing ethos, where nursing is understood as a discipline performing practices that lead to cure. However, this is repudiated by the medical profession at all levels. Moreover, curing stands opposed to the caring ethos in nursing and boundary struggles surface as 'ethos confrontation' between caring‐ and curing‐oriented nurses in practice. The boundary struggles analysed in this paper raise important questions about healthcare manageability and the development of sustainable professional environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to papers published within the issue is presented in the author discusses topics on the effects of several models of welfare state, the failure of COVID-19 response in Chicago, Illinois, and the role of academic disciplines in priority setting and rationing in health care.

In this collection we revisit the enduring phenomenon of uncertainty in health care, and demonstrate how it still offers coherence and significance as an analytic concept. Through empirical studies of contemporary examples of health care related uncertainties and their management, our collection explores the different ways in which uncertainty may be articulated, enacted and experienced. The papers address a diverse range of healthcare contexts ‐ Alzheimer's disease, neonatal surgery, cardiovascular disease prevention, cancer, addiction (use of alcohol and other drugs during pregnancy), mental health/disorders and medical education – and many tackle issues of contemporary relevance, such as an ageing population, and novel medical interventions and their sequelae. These empirical papers are complemented by a further theoretical contribution, which considers the role of 'implicit normativity' in masking and containing potential ethical uncertainty. By mapping themes across the collection, in this introduction we present a number of core analytical strands: (1) conceptualising uncertainty; (2) intersections of uncertainty with aspects of care; (3) managing uncertainty; and (4) structural constraints, economic austerity and uncertainty work. We reflect on the methodological and theoretical stances used to think sociologically about uncertainty in health care, and the strengths, silences and gaps we observe in the collection. We conclude by considering the implications of the insights gained for 'synthesising certainty' in practice and for future research in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paid carers play an important role in helping older adults with care needs to remain living in their own homes. This paper examines changes in the home care field, specifically the emergence of self‐employed care entrepreneurs ('microentrepreneurs'). To do this, it employs Bourdieu's concepts of field, capital and habitus. Drawing on 105 semi‐structured interviews with stakeholders working in home care, the paper describes how the interaction of changes to field structures, and altered practices of care have challenged the taken‐for‐granted acceptance of traditional, transactional forms of care provision. This process has been highly dependent on local state actors, their ability to mobilise relevant forms of capital and the factors which shaped their habitus. It should be seen within the context of changes to local field structures and the hierarchical classification processes which underpin them. These changes threaten the distribution of capital in the home care field in ways that are beneficial to microentrepreneurs. Bourdieu might categorise these developments as 'partial revolutions', which do not challenge the fundamental axioms of the field. However, for care entrepreneurs, formerly employed as low‐paid home‐care workers, a revolution that is only partial may be better than none at all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes a critical look at the role of chronobiology in society today, with particular reference to its entanglements with health and medicine and whether or not this amounts to the (bio)medicalisation of our bodily rhythms. What we have here, we show, is a complex unfolding storyline, within and beyond medicine. On the one hand, the promises and problems of these circadian, infradian and ultradian rhythms for our health and well‐being are now increasingly emphasised. On the other hand, a variety of new rhythmic interventions and forms of governance are now emerging within and beyond medicine, from chronotherapies and chronopharmacology to biocompatible school and work schedules, and from chronodiets to the optimisation of all we do according to our 'chronotypes'. Conceptualising these developments, we suggest challenges us to think within and beyond medicalisation to wider processes of biomedicalisation and the biopolitics of our body clocks: a vital new strand of chronopolitics today indeed which implicates us all in sickness and in health as the very embodiment of these rhythms of life itself. The paper concludes with a call for further research on these complex unfolding relations between chronobiology, health and society in these desynchronised times of ours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various topics within the issue, including adherence to medicine of people with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the antiretroviral treatment access to older South Africans with HIV, and parenting of gay men with HIV.

The medicalisation of marijuana has occurred rapidly, albeit nonuniformly, across the US and around the world over the past 3 decades. This paper centres on the medicalisation of marijuana in Minnesota—which has one of the most restrictive programs in the country—as a case for evaluating the negotiation of institutional boundaries with the shift from criminalisation to medicalisation after nearly a century of criminal prohibition. Drawing upon Foucauldian discourse analyses of the medical and law enforcement associations' position statements and legislative hearings that shaped medical marijuana policy in Minnesota, this paper demonstrates a symbiotic convergence between medicine and law enforcement through the deployment of shared discursive strategies in their opposition to medical marijuana that reinforce marijuana's criminalised status by solidifying the boundaries between proper medicine and dangerous drugs. Criminal justice and medical institutions draw upon one another's definitions, logics, and practices in a mutually constitutive manner, while still maintaining distinct user subjects and institutional interventions for each based on the user's access to state‐approved forms of marijuana. The consequences for the governing of marijuana in Minnesota are explored, as well as the broader implications for the sociological study of medicalisation and criminalisation with respect to the governance of drugs and health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creative well‐being is an increasing field of interest to which biomedical and social sciences have made uneven contributions. The instrumental value of culture and its subsequential public investment is grounded in the interplay of social, cultural and economic capital to attain and preserve wellbeing and health and foster social mobility. The current evidence addresses the effectiveness of arts interventions in improving illnesses. Little attention has been paid to the social value of creative wellbeing for the general population. This paper is a rapid review and evidence synthesis that aims to answer the question, ‘What is the social value of place‐based arts and culture interventions at individual (wellbeing) and community (social inequalities) levels in the UK and Europe?’. After a systematic search of five databases, search engines, and a call for evidence in August 2022, 14 out of 974 sources met the inclusion criteria. Studies were organised into three themes (Community, Events, Museums), and outcomes were analysed considering the indicators and dimensions of wellbeing (Office for National Statistics). The review evidenced that creative wellbeing leads to improvements in wellbeing outcomes and can contribute to alleviating social determinants of health. However, considering their impact on the underlying causes of structural social inequalities requires caution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between religion and health tends to be framed positively. Religion has been found to act as a coping mechanism and source of support in times of ill health. In this paper, we focus on the disruptive effect of chronic illness on religious practice and cultural engagement. Drawing on interviews with ethnic minority adults with end‐stage kidney disease, who also identify as religious, we introduce the concept ‘cultural disruption’. While religious practice and belief was found to provide strength and comfort we also found that chronic illness had a disruptive impact on religious and cultural practice that participants attempted to manage. To highlight the potential disruptive effect of chronic illness on religious faith and cultural engagement we identify three elements of cultural disruption—disruption to religious practice, disruption to sense of self and identity and disruption to wellbeing. We conclude by suggesting that understanding and accounting for the potential of cultural disruption when diagnosing, treating and supporting people with chronic illness offers an alternative entry point to the life‐worlds of patients who identify as religious and the things that are important to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the social support provided by domestic animals to humans during the COVID‐19 pandemic. The study comprises interviews with 39 British and American pet owners during March 2021, the point at which the UK had recently emerged from the third national lockdown and US states were under various restrictions. A thematic network approach to data analysis revealed four global themes, illustrating how pets provided buffers to the stress of the pandemic, facilitated ontological security by maintaining a sense of routine and purpose, offered myriad types of emotional support and enhanced and enabled wider social support. Taken together, these results reinforce and extend knowledge pertaining to the importance of companion animals for social support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Schools are increasingly positioned as sites for intervening on the bodies and minds of children in the here and now in order to bring about health gain for the future. Public health interventions for schools bring together coalitions of commercial, statutory and philanthropic actors with children and their teachers and carers. Drawing on ethnographic case studies in London, UK, this paper explores two such interventions: one aiming to increase levels of physical activity and one to reduce exposure to air pollution. Both interventions not only evoke care for children's own current and future wellbeing but also fold in imaginaries of collective health futures, which orient and legitimise particular intervention logics and actions. As interventions unfold, children are recruited as monitors of health risks in the present. They are also positioned as risk ambassadors, who will leverage care about unhealthy environments and lifestyles across space, to risky domestic environments, and into imagined health futures. These 'futuring' school‐based interventions open up small alternative spaces in which imaginaries of collective and resistant public health practices emerge. However, in the here and now, children appear to be bearing a disproportionate burden of responsibility, as ambassadors for, and imagined saviours of, public and environmental health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Doctors are typically portrayed as active agents in their work lives. However, this paper argues that this construction of agency ignores the effects of the healthcare structures that constrain choice, which in turn affects population health outcomes. Medical training pathways, regional boundaries, and rationalisation all have a long‐lasting impact on the provision of healthcare. Using a mobilities lens to examine the movement of doctors, this paper examines how the expectation of movement built into training programmes perpetuates unequal access to healthcare. Long waiting times, poor care quality and lack of preventative care all perpetuate health inequalities; as one of the socio‐economic determinants, access to healthcare affects health outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accompanying the ageing of contemporary ageing societies is an increase in age associated morbidity, with dementia having an important impact. Mental frailty in later life is a source of fear for many and a major policy concern to all those concerned with health and welfare services. This introduction to the special issue on 'Ageing, dementia and the social mind' situates the selected papers within the context of debates about dementia and its social relations. In particular it draws attention to the importance of the social imaginary of the fourth age and what this means for the issue of personhood, care, social representations of dementia and its social contextualisation. The papers illuminating these themes draw on a variety of disciplines and approaches; from the social sciences to the humanities and from the theoretical to the empirical in order to help orientate future researchers to the complexities of dementia and the social and cultural matrix in which it exists. This paper provides an introduction to the potential for a more extended sociology of dementia; one which could combine the insights from medical sociology with the concerns of social gerontology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most significant developments in healthcare over the past 25 years has been the widespread deployment of information and communication technologies. These technologies have had a wide–ranging impact on the organisation of healthcare, on professional practice and on patients’ experience of illness and its management. In this paper we discuss the ways in which Sociology of Health and Illness has provided a forum for the analysis of these new technologies in healthcare. We review a range of relevant research published in the Journal; papers that address such issues as dehumanisation and emotional labour, professional practice and identity, and the social and institutional shaping of technology. Despite these important initiatives, we suggest that information and communication technologies in healthcare remain relatively under–explored within the Journal and, more generally, by the sociology of health and illness and point to developments in cognate areas which may have some bearing upon the analysis of technology in action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws attention to the health‐related work that disabled people do when engaging with rehabilitation services. Medical sociology has a rich history of looking at the 'illness work' that patients do, while disability studies scholars have explored the cultural value placed upon paid work and the effects on social status of being unable to work. Yet, a longstanding froideur between these two disciplines, which have fundamentally opposed ontologies of illness and disability, means that neither discipline has attended closely to the rehabilitation‐related work that disabled people do. The concept of 'adjusting' to illness highlights seemingly irreconcilable disciplinary differences. Yet this article argues that the notion of 'adjustment work' can elucidate the socio‐political character of the work disabled people do in their rehabilitation, which could create a more substantial and sustainable dialogue on this subject between disability studies and medical sociology. To make this case, we discuss interview data from the Rights‐based Rehabilitation project, which sought to explore disabled people's lived experiences of rehabilitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trends in people having children later in life and increasing evidence of male age‐related fertility decline (ARFD) has led some to propose sperm freezing as a suitable response. However, little consideration has been given to how men might respond to such a proposal, and there has been a paucity of empirical data to inform such a consideration. This paper arises from in‐depth, semi‐structured interviews with men (n = 25) who do not have children but want or expect to have them in the future. Data on men's perceptions of male ARFD and sperm freezing are presented and discussed in accordance with theoretical and conceptual tools relating to reproductive masculinity, biomedicalisation, gendered risk perception and meanings of sperm and masculinity. It suggests that that men's overall lack of concern regarding male ARFD and resistance towards ideas of sperm freezing result not only from a lack of exposure to evidence regarding male ARFD but are also shaped by ideals of reproductive masculinity, and may indicate resistance towards the idea of reproductive control. It argues that these positions perpetuate a gender unequal politicisation of ARFD and perpetuate particular gendered subjectivities relating to culpability and responsibility for guarding against risks of ARFD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the advent of telecare and the logic of information technologies in health care, the idea of placeless care has taken root, capturing imaginations and promising placeless caring futures. This 'de‐territorialisation of care' has been challenged by studies of care practices 'on the ground', showing that care is always (materially) placed. Yet, while sociological scholarship has taken the role of place seriously, there is little conceptual attention for how we may think through immateriality and the changing nature of place in health care. Based on a case study of the introduction of a sensory reality technology into a care organisation, this paper argues that we need (1) to push the definition of placed care into new (digitally produced) landscapes and (2) a new vocabulary, with which to address and conceptualise this changing nature of care places. The paper introduces the term post‐place, as a first step in developing such a vocabulary. Post‐place care, unlike the idea of placeless care or emplaced care, is an inclusive, open and generative concept. Its strength lies in its disruptive potential for challenging existing place‐care ontologies and opening up productive space for thinking through the changing landscapes of health care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]