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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.

Men account for approximately 75% of the one million annual suicide deaths worldwide. Emerging research indicates a link between suicide and men's active pursuit of hegemonic masculinity via emotional restriction. However, little is known of the continuum of suicidal men's emotional practice, and particularly how men mobilise emotions to actively pursue or resist hegemonic masculine ideals. This theorised life‐history study aimed to explore the emotional lives of 18 Australian men who had attempted suicide. Findings indicate that men in this study experienced a range of emotions. However, during childhood, they learned that expressing emotions such as sadness reduced masculine standing, whereas expressing emotions such as anger through acts of violence could enhance masculine status. Although the gendering of emotions offered participants multiple avenues of action to pursue or contest masculine ideals, they remained vulnerable to suicide. For some men, it became impossible to conceal escalating feelings of distress. For other men, displays of anger and violence resulted in job loss, relationship breakdown or criminal conviction. Many participants indicated that suicide presented a means of ending painful emotions. Paradoxically, suicide could also become an alternative means of demonstrating masculinity, whereby the body became both the vehicle and object of violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our research examines how different forms of knowledge and expertise are increasingly important in caring for people experiencing mental illness. We build on theoretical developments regarding multiple ontologies of knowing about illness. We examine how experiential knowledge of mental health problems, learned by being subject to illness rather than through objective study, is enacted in mental healthcare teams. We focus on Peer Workers (PW), individuals who have lived experience of mental health problems, and who contribute knowledge and expertise to mental health care within multidisciplinary healthcare teams. Our longitudinal study was undertaken over 2 years by a multidisciplinary team who conducted 91 interviews with PW and other stakeholders to peer support within a comparative case study design. We show how workers with tacit, experiential knowledge of mental ill health engaged in care practice. First, we show how subjective knowing is underpinned by unique socialisation that enables the development of shared interactional spaces. Second, we point to how the situated nature of subjective knowing is uniquely embedded in time and space and allows for the alignment of embodied knowledge with trajectories of care. Third, we provide insight into how subjective forms of expertise might be incorporated into multidisciplinary care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medical sociology, mainly an Anglo-Saxon invention, was developed almost without any theoretical reference to Norbert Elias' work. One of the consequences of this ignorance was that a very challenging idea had been lost. This idea addressed the sociological problems associated with the historical changes that in turn affected the role played by hygiene in the normalisation of human behaviour. According to Elias' Civilizing Process, the progressive changes in human behaviour were part of global dynamics involving the transformation of both social structures and individuals' habitus. In the construction of the 'civilised behaviour' characteristic of the dominant group, hygienic preoccupation played no role. The medical discoveries of the 19th century about the infectious diseases gave a posteriori an addition of legitimacy to this civilised behaviour. Adopting Elias' perspective, I try to answer a question left unexplored in his work, i.e. the place of contemporary medical knowledge and practices within the ongoing civilising process. This question leads me to analyse: 1 the role played by 'Pasteurian hygiene in the policy of civilization' of the lower classes in France 2 the tendency towards the medicalisation of self-control behaviour and the emergence of the patient as medical auxiliary involved in the division of medical works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An ethnographic study of a one year part-time course for potential GP trainers is reported using Bernstein's concepts of classification and framing as a means of analysis. The significance of the course and the changes it attempts to bring about are assessed by means of two comparisons. First, the course is related to the classic studies of under-graduate socialisation within medical school where it is seen to undermine this socialisation through the development of special skills. Second, the development of such special skills is seen as part of an historical trend leading to the further separation or emancipation of general practice from hospital medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]