Contemporary legends, rumours and collective behaviour: some neglected resources for medical sociology?

Prologue: Sociology, Medicine and Medical Sociology

Do all disciplines fret over the state of their own intellectual and policy-relevant health? Is it a symptom of our hyper-reflexive and confessional times that collective anxiety has to be rehearsed over the track record, and present and projected performance of a group of scholars? Medical sociology’s lengthy reflections on the state of its own practice are recognizable as part of a more gener...

Internet resources for medical education

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Medical Sociology and Sociological Theory

Complex Systems Theory: Some Considerations for Sociology

This essay presents a reflection on the main implications of Complexity Theory for science in general, redefining and dispelling myths of traditional science, and Sociology in particular, suggesting a redefinition of Parsons’ classic concept of Social System, articulated around the property of self-maintenance of order rather than on its possible discontinuity and instability. It argues that Co...

On Distribution, Drift and the Electronic Medical Record: Some Tools for a Sociology of the Formal

Formal tools (i.e , tools that operate on circumscribed input using rules, and that contain a model of the workplace in which are to function) are attributed central roles in organizing work within many modern workplaces. How to comprehend the power of these tools? Taking the (electronic) medical record as an example, this paper builds upon recent calls to overcome the dichotomy between the For...