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Debates about the state of Australian sociology have raged for as long as sociology has existed in Australia. Concerns about the discipline's future may be inevitable for a critical, reflexive discipline, but to those entering the discipline, it is neither instructive nor productive to be subjected to lingering disciplinary anxieties. After more than fifty years, it is time to take stock of the differing visions of sociology, and examine the arguments about the health, or otherwise, of Australian sociology. To advance this debate, we consider the signs and benchmarks of a 'successful' sociology as expressed in The Australian Sociological Association magazine, NEXUS, and key writings from Australian sociologists. We suggest that much of the disagreement over the status of sociology derives from the way 'disciplines' and 'success' are defined. Regarding sociology to be an heterogeneous, multi-modal, social institution and practice, we propose a way forward in our efforts to represent ourselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been a renewal of interest in the writing of national histories of sociology, with dozens of histories recently published in both the global North and South. Despite this, there has been a dearth of discussion about the methods and methodologies appropriate to such a task. Indeed, few histories of sociology, and fewer still national histories of sociology, explicitly address methodology. In this study, we review the literature on histories of sociology from a variety of countries, focusing on how the authors have approached the writing of history, and their implicit use of methods and methodologies. We suggest the use of a content analysis as an additional, though perhaps unusual, method of historiography, and apply this in the case of an Australian history of sociology. Our content analysis reveals both similarities and differences in the Australian approach, indicating the impact of settler-colonialism on Australian sociology and its historiography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australia was settled as a colony of Britain from the 17th century, and its early history of violent occupation has gradually given way to a relatively peaceful, wealthy, multicultural society. As a post‐colonial country, its people share characteristics with those of Britain, but, as a multicultural society, national identity is increasingly influenced by the cultures of many countries, from both the global North and South. In this paper, the question of Australia's placement as a country of the global North or South is explored. Considerations of geography, the economy, political regimes and national identity are the backdrop to an investigation of Australian scholarship and the attitudes of scholars to the inclusion of Australia as a country of the global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on a discourse analysis of the representation of healthcare in the print news media, and the way this representation shapes perspectives of healthcare. We analysed news items from six major Australian newspapers over a three-year time period. We show how various framing devices promote ideas about a crisis in the current public healthcare system, the existence of a precarious balance between the public and private health sectors, and the benefits of private healthcare. We employ Bourdieu's concepts of field and capital to demonstrate the processes through which these devices are employed to conceal the power relations operating in the healthcare sector, to obscure the identity of those who gain the most from the expansion of private sector medicine, and to indirectly increase health inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much is made of the persistent structures of inequality that determine the production and distribution of goods and services across the world, but less is known about the inequalities of global academic knowledge production, and even a smaller amount about the nature of the publication industry upon which this production process depends. Reflecting on an international study of academic publishing that has been framed within the lens of Southern theory, this article explores some of the issues facing those who work and publish in the global South, and offers an analysis of several of the mechanisms that assist to maintain the inequalities of the knowledge system. The focus then moves to an examination of some recent developments in academic publishing which challenge the dominance of the global North: the building of alternative transnational circuits of publishing that provide effective pathways for the distribution of academic knowledge from ‘inside the global South’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Choice is an imperative for patients in the Australian healthcare system. The complexity of this healthcare ‘maze’, however, means that successfully navigating and making choices depends not only on the decisions of patients, but also other key players in the healthcare sector. Utilising Bourdieu's concepts of capital, habitus and field, we analyse the role of gatekeepers (i.e., those who control access to resources, services and knowledge) in shaping patients' experiences of healthcare, and producing opportunities to enable or constrain their choices. Indepth interviews were conducted with 41 gatekeepers (GPs, specialists, nurses, hospital administrators and policymakers), exploring how they acquire and use knowledge within the healthcare system. Our findings reveal a hierarchy of knowledges and power within the healthcare field which determines the forms of knowledge that are legitimate and can operate as capital within this complex and dynamic arena. As a consequence, forms of knowledge which can operate as capital, are unequally distributed and strategically controlled, ensuring democratic 'reform' remains difficult and 'choices' limited to those beneficial to private medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses changing social perspectives on knowledge, from the old sociology of knowledge to current post-colonial debates. The authors propose an approach that sees knowledge not as an abstract social construction but as the product of specific forms of social labour, showing the ontoformativity of social practice that creates reality through historical time. Research in three southern-tier countries examines knowledge workers and their labour process, knowledge institutions including workplaces and communication systems, economic strategies and the resourcing of knowledge work and workforces. This research shows in detail the contested hegemony of the global metropole in domains of knowledge. It reveals forms of negotiation that reshape knowledge production, and shows the importance for knowledge workers of the dynamics of global change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many contemporary healthcare systems, individuals are expected to be rational actors – weighing up available knowledge and making choices about their healthcare needs. In the policy context, this has been most explicitly applied to the financing of healthcare where there is encouragement for the purchase of private health insurance. However, perceptions of public and private healthcare provision, knowledge about healthcare needs, and the types of services people choose, are far from straightforward. Drawing on Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, field, and capital, and a study of individual experiences of choice in Australian healthcare, we explore the knowledges used by people as they navigate through the healthcare system. Such navigation takes place in a milieu where authoritative medical knowledge intersects with knowledge from other sources, including the Internet and lived experience. However, our study reveals that navigation of healthcare is assisted most of all by the capacity to draw on 'system knowledge'. System knowledge takes two, sometimes overlapping, forms. First, acquired system knowledge is produced through drawing on experience, formal knowledge and the capacity to undertake research (primarily cultural capital). Second, assumed system knowledge enables navigation of the healthcare system through accessing and utilising networks of privilege (primarily economic and social capital). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The promotion of choice is a common theme in both policy discourses and commercial marketing claims about healthcare. However, within the multiple potential pathways of the healthcare ‘maze’, how do healthcare ‘consumers’ or patients understand and experience choice? What is meant by ‘choice’ in the policy context, and, importantly from a sociological perspective, how are such choices socially produced and structured? In this theoretical article, the authors consider the interplay of Bourdieu’s three key, interlinked concepts – capital, habitus and field – in the structuring of healthcare choice. These are offered as an alternative to rational choice theory, where ‘choice’ is regarded uncritically as a fundamental ‘good’ and able to provide a solution to the problems of the healthcare system. The authors argue that sociological analyses of healthcare choice must take greater account of the ‘field’ in which choices are made in order to better explain the structuring of choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on a citation-context analysis of journal articles from Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. Examining publications from the sociology of health and medicine, the study draws a number of conclusions about the state of sociology, inter-country relationships between knowledge workers, and national systems of sociological knowledge production. It finds that core–periphery relations define significant features of sociological work, impacting on citation patterns, inter-country collaboration and the selection of reference materials. Core–periphery relations are also found to influence the sociological production of knowledge across the Australian university sector. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The production of sociological knowledge in Australian universities is explored through an empirical study of research papers published in a selection of academic outlets between 1960 and 2011. Drawing on theories concerning scholarly practices, institutional formation and the sociology of knowledge, questions are posed about the factors that shape and structure the production of sociological knowledge about health and medicine. The concept of intellectual schools is examined, with evidence sought for the presence of these 'knowledge networks' in the Australian context. The study suggests the formation and maintenance of schools are subject to structural factors within the university sector, specifically the relative wealth and prestige of the university and the dictates of the higher education market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a study of the specialist field of the sociology of health and medicine, and examines its institutional development in Australia. A thesis is developed about the relationship between the field and the parent discipline of sociology. The formation of the discipline and the specialist field are proposed to have occurred in stages: the formative years, a period of inter-disciplinarity and collaboration, a stage of intensification and organisation, the years of institutional growth and specialisation, the decade of consolidation and fragmentation, and, its most recent phase, a time of 'new' internationalisation. Moreover, the institutionalisation of the sociology of health and medicine has closely followed the developmental trajectory of its parent discipline, even though its disciplinary boundaries have been, and continue to be, less rigid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the articles within the issue of the journal on topics including privatisation as a form of neo-liberal accumulation by dispossession, impact of the commoditisation of nursing care and pressures toward privatization, is presented.

Differing accounts are conventionally given of the origins of medical sociology and its parent discipline of sociology. These distinct 'histories' are justified on the basis that the sociological founders were uninterested in medicine, mortality and disease. This article challenges these 'constructions' of the past, proposing the theorization of health not as a 'late development of sociology' but an integral part of its formation. Drawing on a selection of key sociological texts, it is argued that evidence of the founders' sustained interest in the infirmities of the individual, of mortality, and in medicine, have been expunged from the historical record through processes of 'canonization' and 'medicalization'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many countries, including Australia, are currently experiencing severe shortages of professional, para-professional, and semi-professional workers in their health care systems. This is generally conceived as a problem stemming from rising demand in health care services or the production of inadequate numbers of health related graduates. A qualitative study of health care workers in the Australian context challenges the adequacy of this supply-demand approach to the health care system; and demonstrates that solutions lie in the conceptualisation of the health sector as a socio-cultural system. Findings indicate the extent to which policies independently formulated for the health, education, finance, and industry sectors have, in combination, inadvertently impacted on the functioning of the health care system, and some policy mechanisms, such as privatisation and marketisation, have fundamentally eroded its structural framework. Conclusions can therefore be drawn about the relationship between workforce shortages and the neo-liberal orientation of recent governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How is global‐North predominance in the making of organized knowledge affected by the rise of new domains of research? This question is examined empirically in three interdisciplinary areas – climate change, HIV‐AIDS, and gender studies – through interviews with 70 researchers in Southern‐tier countries Brazil, South Africa and Australia. The study found that the centrality of the North was reinstituted as these domains came into existence, through resource inequalities, workforce mechanisms, and intellectual framing. Yet there are tensions in the global economy of knowledge, around workforce formation, hierarchies of disciplines, neoliberal management strategies, and mismatches with social need. Intellectual workers in the Southern tier have built significant research centres, workforces and some distinctive knowledge projects. These create wider possibilities of change in the global structure of organized knowledge production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Simon Kitto on sociology of surgery and evidence-based medicine and another by Pauline Savy concerning self identity problem and experience in dementing illnesses.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue including one by Alex Dumas, Bryan Turner, Joanna Sikora and Frank Lewins on the ethical implications of new and older technologies which might lengthen or shorten an individual's life and another by David Plummer and Pol McCann on the relationship between homophobia and heterosexuality.

Introduces a series of articles on health policies.

In this paper, we examine the intersections between place and healthcare choice, drawing on Bourdieu's concepts of distinction and social space, and engaging with data from interviews with 78 Australians living in varied geographic locations. We find the status of an area is used to judge the quality of its healthcare services. Areas with high status are assumed to have better quality health services than areas of disadvantage. Where people live shapes the choices they make and their judgements about the status of a place. Moreover, having less choice is not necessarily problematic. Participants in regional and remote areas with less choice tend to report positive experiences with healthcare providers. Place can constrain people's ability to make good healthcare choices, yet participants have differing capacities to mobilise resources to overcome the constraints of place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines a group of intellectual workers who occupy a peripheral but not powerless position in the global economy of knowledge. How do they handle relations with the global metropole, especially in new fields of research where established hierarchies are in question? Three new domains of knowledge - climate change, HIV/AIDS and gender studies - are studied through interviews with 70 active researchers in Southern-tier countries Brazil, South Africa and Australia. A pattern of extraversion, involving active adoption of paradigms from the metropole, is widespread and institutionally supported. Major alternative knowledge formations have not emerged in these domains. However contestations of more specific kinds are frequent. Paradigms are adapted, criticism is offered, activism is engaged, capacities are developed and allegiances sometimes changed. The valorization of local knowledge, which goes beyond the abstractions of universalized paradigms, is particularly significant. Not stark subordination, but a complex collective negotiation characterizes the response of intellectual workers in the Southern tier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the appreciation and encouragement of the editor-in-chief on the critics and contributors of the journal "Health Sociology Review."

The author presents an overview of the topics discussed within the issue. The relations between health, gender, class, policy and the labeling of disease and concepts such as social capital are investigated. The use of technologies in clinical work and the management and funding of the healthcare system are examined.

Background: Comparative optimism, the belief that negative events are more likely to happen to others rather than to oneself, is well established in health risk research. It is unknown, however, whether comparative optimism also permeates people's health expectations and potentially behaviour during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Objectives: Data were collected through an international survey (N = 6485) exploring people's thoughts and psychosocial behaviours relating to COVID‐19. This paper reports UK data on comparative optimism. In particular, we examine the belief that negative events surrounding risk and recovery from COVID‐19 are perceived as more likely to happen to others rather than to oneself. Methods: Using online snowball sampling through social media, anonymous UK survey data were collected from N = 645 adults during weeks 5‐8 of the UK COVID‐19 lockdown. The sample was normally distributed in terms of age and reflected the UK ethnic and disability profile. Findings: Respondents demonstrated comparative optimism where they believed that as compared to others of the same age and gender, they were unlikely to experience a range of controllable (eg accidentally infect/ be infected) and uncontrollable (eg need hospitalization/ intensive care treatment if infected) COVID‐19‐related risks in the short term (P <.001). They were comparatively pessimistic (ie thinking they were more at risk than others for developing COVID‐19‐related infection or symptoms) when thinking about the next year. Discussion: This is one of the first ever studies to report compelling comparative biases in UK adults' thinking about COVID‐19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Signifi cant transformations of the health care services sector over the past three decades have seen an increasing reliance on the private provision of health care services mediated through private health insurance. In countries such as Australia and the UK, private health insurance is promoted as providing a greater choice for individuals and easing the burden on the public system. While these claims, the policy contexts and the decision-making processes of individual consumers have attracted some sociological attention, little has been said about the role of private insurers. In this article we present a comparative analysis of the websites of private health insurers in Australia and the UK. Our analysis highlights adoption by private health insurers of neoliberal discourses of choice and individual responsibility, partnership and healthy lifestyles. In these respects, similarities between the discourses over-ride national differences which might otherwise be expected given their contrasting health care traditions and contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Signifi cant transformations of the health care services sector over the past three decades have seen an increasing reliance on the private provision of health care services mediated through private health insurance. In countries such as Australia and the UK, private health insurance is promoted as providing a greater choice for individuals and easing the burden on the public system. While these claims, the policy contexts and the decision-making processes of individual consumers have attracted some sociological attention, little has been said about the role of private insurers. In this article we present a comparative analysis of the websites of private health insurers in Australia and the UK. Our analysis highlights adoption by private health insurers of neoliberal discourses of choice and individual responsibility, partnership and healthy lifestyles. In these respects, similarities between the discourses over-ride national differences which might otherwise be expected given their contrasting health care traditions and contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]