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Stress‐induced mental illnesses have become the focus of increasing international attention, particularly in Japan since the 1990s, where judiciary cases and welfare‐state initiatives established causal links between work stress and mental illness. However, how individuals retrospectively construct this causality remains a marginal topic in the literature. This ethnographic article explores the ways in which male workers seeking compensation for their condition (depression and adjustment disorder) reconstruct aetiology narratives and to what avail. This paper demonstrates two themes: (1) how objectivising stress (related to specific formats of worker compensation), no‐faulting (dispensing with individual blame to view stress as pervasive in the workplace) and negotiating blame (seeking explanation in terms of individual psychology) construct a case, and (2) how narrative reconstruction functions as both a barrier to recovery and way of working towards recovery and collective function. It is argued that the narrative reconstructions of workers, who become unwell and seek recognition, suggest uncertain self‐victimisation despite the broader understanding of mental illness in contemporary Japan. The findings imply the heuristic potential of relativising causality and treating analytical dichotomies, including causality–narrative, victimhood–agency and fact–fiction, not as contradictory alternatives, but as different analysis levels, to better understand ambiguous illness narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of social structure is one of the main building blocks of the social sciences, but it lacks any precise technical definition within general sociological theory. This paper reviews the way in which the concept has been deployed within medical sociology, arguing that in recent times it has been used primarily as a frame for the sociological interpretation of health inequalities and their social determinants. It goes on to examine the contribution that medical sociologists have made to the debate over health inequalities, giving particular attention to contributions to Sociology of Health and Illness. These have often provided a focus for discussions outside or critical of the mainstream debates that have been driven primarily by epidemiologists. The paper reviews some of the main points of criticism of epidemiological approaches, focusing in particular on the methodological constraints that limit the capacity of epidemiologists to develop more theoretically satisfactory accounts of the inter–relationships of social structure, context and agency in their impact on health and well being. Some recent examples from the Journal of more theoretically innovative and analytically fine–grained approaches to understanding the impact of social structure on health are then explored. The paper concludes with an argument for a more historically–informed analysis of the relationships between social structure and health, using the knowledgeable narratives of people in places as a window onto those relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within western cultures, portrayals of dementia as 'a living death' are being challenged by people living with the diagnosis. Yet dementia remains one of the most feared conditions. The sociological lens of citizenship provides a conceptual framework for reviewing the role of society and culture in repositioning dementia away from deficit to a discourse of agency and interdependence. Awareness of cognitive change, and engaging with the diagnostic process, moves people into a transitional, or 'liminal' state of uncertainty. They are no longer able to return to their previous status, but may resist the unwanted status of 'person with dementia'. Drawing on qualitative studies on social participation by people with dementia, we suggest that whether people are able to move beyond the liminal phase depends on acceptance of the diagnosis, social capital, personal and cultural beliefs, the responses of others and comorbidities. Some people publicly embrace a new identity whereas others withdraw, or are withdrawn, from society to live in the shadow of the fourth age. We suggest narratives of deficit fail to reflect the agency people with dementia can enact to shape their social worlds in ways which enable them to establish post-liminal citizen roles. (A Virtual Abstract of this paper can be viewed at: ) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health practices are shaped by gender relations and constructs. Utilising qualitative data, this study explores a shift in medication practices among gay men living with HIV (GMLH) in light of changing HIV/AIDS responses in Taiwan. In the 1980s and 1990s, the mobilisation of moralising discourses forged a gender hierarchy that subordinated HIV‐positive gay males. In the 2000s, new state programmes on HIV/AIDS were implemented to enhance patients' adherence to treatment, but GMLH often expressed ambivalence towards medication, which could lead to HIV disclosure and, consequently, social exclusions under the gender hierarchy. Starting in the 2010s, the knowledge of HIV 'treatment as prevention' and a policy on early treatment have offered a new path for GMLH to navigate gender power dynamics and to strive towards an inclusive social life by taking medicine and optimising health, which facilitates a biomedicalisation of subordinated masculinity. This study contributes to the scholarship on HIV/AIDS by underscoring the significance of biomedicine for configuring masculine identities and practices among a subordinated group of men, as well as by highlighting the gender power relations and everyday 'nonbiomedical' negotiating practices that legitimise biomedicalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global discourses have advocated women's empowerment as a means to reduce their own's food insecurity, which is also key development challenges in Bangladesh. However, little empirical research has conducted on this issue, especially in the rural area of Bangladesh. Therefore, the present study was conducted to examine the relationship of six domains of women's empowerment with their food security in rural Bangladesh using a partial least square structural equation modelling approach. Our empirical analysis indicates that women's accesses to their legal and familial rights and decision‐making roles in households increase their bargaining power over the utilization of resources and to choices of food which significantly and negatively decrease their food insecurity. Moreover, information and communication technologies and infrastructure facilities also negatively and significantly associated with women's food insecurity. However, women's leadership has a negative but not significant effect on their food insecurity, as low self‐esteem rural women feel no ease in publicly addressing their inequalities. By understanding family composition from women's perceptions, the results from our research can assist policymakers to develop more suitable strategies to enhance the empowerment status of rural women and reduce their food insecurity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public care work organisations in Northern Europe often seek to increase their economic efficiency in ways that care workers criticise for reducing both their professional autonomy and the quality of care. Recently, the ideal of 'enterprising nursing' has emerged as a political belief according to which economic efficiency, care workers' autonomy and the quality of care can be improved in tandem by cultivating care workers' agential abilities. This article examines the reception of this belief among migrant care workers in Finland. Drawing on research interviews, the analysis demonstrates how migrant care workers may have difficulties in aligning themselves with the enterprising ideals but also in protesting them. Ethnicity, and the status of a migrant, can offer resources for both constructing enterprising subjectivities and reframing care workers' agency, and their organisational environment, in more critical terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of 'context' are increasingly widespread. These studies often become entrenched in methodological debates rather than being conceptually satisfying. We suggest that part of the problem lies in an inappropriate use of 'classic' methods used by epidemiologists to study context and that it may be useful to study, instead, the relationship between agency (the ability for people to deploy a range of causal powers), practices (the activities that make and transform the world we live in) and social structure (the rules and resources in society). We utilise two examples from the current literature to illustrate these problems; the study of lifestyles and social inequalities in disease outcomes. We develop the notion of collective lifestyles as a tentative solution, inspired by Pierre Bourdieu's theory of social action, Anthony Giddens' structuration theory and Amartya Sen's capability theory. Collective lifestyles are defined as an expression of a shared way of relating and acting in a given environment. It is proposed that context is created by relationships between people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]