Partha Kar: Is being a doctor a vocation?

Being a Doctor, Not a Bug Detective

I am sure you’ve heard about the triple aim introduced by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement —improving patient experience, reducing cost, and improving the health of a population. I recently discovered that this is being reconsidered, in light of a crucial missing piece – the people who actually are responsible for the patient experience and healthcare. Now conceptualized as the quadrupl...

Sociology as a Vocation

What does it mean to live for sociology, today? In attempting to answer this question I return to Max Weber’s famous lectures delivered toward the end of his life—one on science as a vocation and the other on politics as a vocation. He presented ‘‘Science as a Vocation’’ in November 1917 toward the end of World War I and the more pessimistic ‘‘Politics as a Vocation’’ in January 1919 after Germ...

The drama of being a doctor.

O ne comparatively unusual and perhaps uncomfortable way of thinking about the practice of medicine is that the consultation with a patient is a kind of theatre. The doctor and the patient have their roles, actually encapsulated by the medical sociologist’s Talcott Parson’s conceptualisation of the ‘‘sick role’’—which the patient plays. What part the doctor adopts has oddly received less attent...

Psychoanalysis as a Vocation

POlitical theOry as a VOcatiOn

The purpose of this paper is to sketch some of the implications, prospective and retrospective, of the primacy of method in the present study of politics and to do it by way of a contrast, which is deliberately heightened, but hopefully not caricatured, between the vocation of the “methodist”1 and the vocation of the theorist. My discussion will be centered around the kinds of activity involved...