The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Medical Sociology

William C. Cockerham, William C. Cockerham

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781119633761
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

A comprehensive collection of original essays by leading medical sociologists from around the world, fully updated to reflect contemporary research and global health issues

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Medical Sociology is an authoritative overview of the most recent research, major theoretical approaches, and central issues and debates within the field. Bringing together contributions from an international team of leading scholars, this wide-ranging volume summarizes significant new developments and discusses a broad range of globally-relevant topics. The Companion 's twenty-eight chapters contain timely, theoretically-informed coverage of the coronavirus pandemic and emerging diseases, bioethics, healthcare delivery systems, health disparities associated with migration, social class, gender, and race. It also explores mental health, the family, religion, and many other real-world health concerns.

The most up-to-date and comprehensive single-volume reference on the key concepts and contemporary issues in medical sociology, this book:

• Presents thematically-organized essays by authors who are recognized experts in their fields
• Features new chapters reflecting state-of-the-art research and contemporary issues relevant to global health
• Covers vital topics such as current bioethical debates and the global effort to cope with the coronavirus pandemic
• Discusses the important relationship between culture and health in a global context
• Provide fresh perspectives on the sociology of the body, biomedicalization, health lifestyle theory, doctor-patient relations, and social capital and health

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Medical Sociology is essential reading for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in medical sociology, health studies, and health care, as well as for academics, researchers, and practitioners wanting to keep pace with new developments in the field.

Part I
Introduction

1
Medical Sociology and Its Changing Subfields

TERRENCE D. HILL, WILLIAM C. COCKERHAM, JANE D. MCLEOD, AND FREDERIC W. HAFFERTY

The sociological study of health, illness, and healing systems in the US has expanded substantively and deepened theoretically over the past half century. While work in this area once fit under the single moniker of “Medical Sociology,” we now use a range of alternative labels (e.g. Sociology of Medicine, Sociology of Health and Illness, Sociology of Health, Illness, and Healing, Sociology of Health, Health Sociology) and definitions to describe the field. Some definitions highlight topic areas:

“Medical sociology is the study of health care as it is institutionalized in a society, and of health, or illness, and its relationship to social factors” (Ruderman 1981: 927).

“The sociology of health and illness studies such issues as how social and cultural factors influence health and people’s perceptions of health and healing, and how healing is done in different societies” (Freund et al. 2003: 2)

“Medical sociology focuses on the social causes and consequences of health and illness” (Cockerham 2017: 4).

Others emphasize different aspects of the sociological perspective:

“Medical Sociology is the subfield which applies the perspectives, conceptualizations, theories, and methodologies of sociology to phenomena having to do with human health and disease. As a specialization, medical sociology encompasses a body of knowledge which places health and disease in a social, cultural, and behavioral context” (Committee on Certification in Medical Sociology 1986).

“The most important tasks of medical sociology are to demonstrate and emphasize the important influence of cultural, social-structural, and institutional forces on health, healing, and illness…” (Weiss and Lonnquist 2016: 11).

“An approach that emphasizes using the area of health, illness, and health care to answer research questions of interest to sociologists in general. This approach often requires researchers to raise questions that could challenge medical views of the world and power relationships within the health care world” (Weitz 2017: 346).

The many labels and definitions that have been offered suggest a lack of consensus on defining medical sociology’s substantive scope and its most significant contributions to knowledge. Some suggest that it is “hard to find a comprehensible statement of what… medical sociology is” (Chaiklin 2011: 585). Others describe the field as a “loosely connected network of disparate subgroups” (Veenstra 2002: 748). This state of the field raises several fundamental questions. How can we characterize our field in a general and consistent manner? What are our contemporary disciplinary boundaries? What are our major subfields? In other words, who are we now, and what do we do?

In this chapter, we propose a disciplinary structure for medical sociology that attempts to answer these questions. By “disciplinary structure,” we mean a representative model of our major subfields as defined by topic areas, theoretical orientations, and significant contributions to the study of health. All sciences invariably reflect on these important issues and, in doing so, define their scientific orientation and boundaries in relation to other sciences, including, for example, medical sociology (Bloom 1986; Gold 1977; Petersdorf and Feinstein 1980; Straus 1957), medical anthropology (Saillant and Genest 2007), health psychology (Baum et al. 2011), and health economics (Pauly et al. 2012). Explicit disciplinary structures are one way to set disciplinary boundaries, mark accomplishments, and direct future efforts toward a cumulative science. Substantive topics and concepts alone are too granular to signify a field’s major organizing principles. As Zerubavel (1991) once pointed out, things become meaningful only when placed into categories, and the “islands of meaning” that are created in this process explain what matters to a particular social world (or in this case, medical sociology) and help to determine the nature of its social order (or field of knowledge). In short, it is through the process of classification that we establish our boundaries and identity and, by extension, distinguish ourselves from other fields within sociology and other disciplines concerned with health.

The identification of a disciplinary structure was once integral to the development of the field, as evidenced in Straus’s (1957) classic distinction between the sociology of medicine and sociology in medicine. Six decades have passed since Straus offered his structure, and we believe it is time to consider a more contemporary scheme that acknowledges the expansion of our subject matter, the broadening of theoretical influences, and the resultant complexity. Our primary aim here is to stimulate a forward-looking conversation among medical sociologists by reviewing previous conceptualizations and proposing a new model to serve as a basis for discussion. Our model classifies medical sociology in terms of its major subfields as defined by substantive topics, theoretical orientations, and scientific contributions. We review the unique contributions of each subfield while recognizing an underlying unity driven by common training in sociological theory and methods. We end with several recommendations for a more refined and directed conceptualization of the field.

There are several reasons why we should be having these discussions. When we define our major subfields and contributions to the study of health, we (1) claim our independence from other health sciences (e.g. medicine), (2) maintain our status in the marketplace of health research (e.g. as health psychologists and public health researchers publish more and more on socioeconomic inequalities), and (3) develop as a cumulative science through a formal recognition of the expansion of our field’s purview. Before Straus (1957), for example, some questioned whether sociology should be considered a “third branch to medicine” (Boulton 2017: 242). When we stop reflecting and leave our subfields undefined, we lose track of our major contributions across generations of medical sociologists and in the broader interdisciplinary field of health research, leaving scholars from other health sciences (e.g. public health) unable to identify them. We also create intellectual vacuums for less fruitful discussions. For example, when we stopped discussing subfields in the late 1980s, we began the great “moniker debate” over whether to continue using the term “medical sociology” or to rename ourselves something else to be more inclusive of work related more to health than medicine. Instead of taking up that debate, we intend to redirect the conversation to how best to represent our disciplinary structure. Ultimately, we believe that focusing more on our major subfields and contributions to sociology and the broader study of health will support more productive and substantive conversations about what medical sociology has to offer.

PREVIOUS SUBFIELD MODELS

The establishment of subfields within medical sociology was a major advance in its early development. In the 1950s, Straus (1957) proposed a two-subfield structure that included the sociology of medicine and sociology in medicine. These subfields were important because they (1) organized studies depending on the extent to which they served the interests of sociology vs. medicine and (2) sought to highlight the unique contributions of sociology to the study of health, illness, and medical practice. In the 1980s, Petersdorf and Feinstein (1980) suggested a more elaborate six-subfield model that was still based on sociology’s stance vis-à-vis professional medicine, including sociology in medicine, sociology of medicine, sociology for medicine, sociology from medicine, sociology at medicine, and sociology around medicine. Still others advocated for a sociology with medicine (Bury 1986; Horobin 1985; Levine 1987). Although elaborations on Straus’ original model never really took hold (Cockerham 1983; Hollingshead 1973; Ruderman 1981; Straus 1999; Wardwell 1982), we argue that, after decades of scholarship, the two-subfield model no longer adequately represents our contemporary disciplinary structure or our contributions to the study of health. For example, many medical sociologists no longer define themselves primarily in relation to medicine (whether critical of, or allied with it), and areas of inquiry that have distinct sociological identities have become more prominent (e.g. social epidemiology). For these reasons, we take Straus’ (1957) original concerns with disciplinary structure in a new direction by defining subfields that are distinguished by substantive topics, theoretical orientations, and contributions to the interdisciplinary study of health.

Handbooks and textbooks typically divide the field substantively. For example, the third edition of the Handbook of Medical Sociology (Freeman, Levine, and Reeder 1979) was organized into five parts: “Health and Illness,” “Health Care Providers,” “Individual and Organizational Behavior,” “Health Policy Dimensions,” and “Methods and Status in Medical Sociology.” The most recent sixth edition of the Handbook of Medical Sociology (Bird et al. 2010) adopted a different set of three organizational categories: “Social Contexts and Health Disparities,” “Health Trajectories and Experiences,” and “Health-Care Organization, Delivery, and Impact.” The Handbook of Health, Illness, and Healing (Pescosolido et al. 2011) offered yet another distinct seven-part scheme: “Rethinking Connecting Sociology’s Role in Health, Illness, and Healing,” “Connecting Communities,” “Connecting to Medicine: The Profession and Its Organizations,” “Connecting to the People: The Public as Patient and Powerful Force,” “Connecting Personal & Cultural Systems,” “Connecting to Dynamics: The Health and Illness Career,” and “Connecting to the Individual and the Body.”

When we turn to important textbooks, we find four major sections in Cockerham (2017) (Health and Illness, Seeking Health Care, Providing Health Care, and Health Care Delivery Systems) and four major sections in Weitz (2017) (Social Factors and Illness, The Meaning and Experience of Illness, Health Care Systems, Settings, and Technologies, and Health Care, Health Research, and Bioethics). In Weiss and Lonnquist (2016), we see a more complex structure with no major sections or organizational schemes. Although these formats are effective for textbook presentations of the literature, they are more a collection of topics than major subfields that might org...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• PART I: INTRODUCTION
• PART II: THEORETICAL APPROACHES
• PART III: HEALTH AND SOCIAL INEQUALITY
• PART IV: HEALTH AND SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS
• PART V: HEALTH AND DISEASE
• PART VI: HEALTH CARE DELIVERY
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• End User License Agreement