Maja Korica

Making sense of professional identities: Stories of medical professionals and new technologies

This article presents an exploratory account of how medical professionals understand the relationship between new technology and their professional identities. Drawing on interview data with senior surgeons from a variety of surgical disciplines, the article draws attention to how new technologies provide occasions for the evaluation of existing intra- and inter-professional relationships, and professional identity as a whole. In particular, the role of changing insider/outsider dynamics is emphasized, as is the importance of recognizing professional identity as in constant flux at micro-, meta- and macro-levels. The implications for existing theory are discussed, and further research questions identified.

Thinking about think tanks in health care: a call for a new research agenda

Little sociological attention has been given to the role of think tanks in health policy and planning. Existing work in political science and public administration tends to define and categorise think tanks and situate them as a disinterested source of policy expertise. Despite the increasingly visible presence of think tanks in the world of health care, such work has done little to reveal how they operate, by whom and to what ends. Our article seeks to redress this firstly by examining why they have remained relatively hidden in academic analyses and secondly by advocating an interpretive approach that incorporates think tanks within the wider landscape of health policy and planning. In contrast to most existing literature, an interpretive approach acknowledges that much of the messy business of healthcare policy and planning remains hidden from view and that much can be gleaned by examining the range of organisations, actors, coalitions, everyday activities, artefacts and interactions that make up the think tank stage and that work together to shape health policy and planning. Given the paucity of research in this area, we urge the medical sociology community to open the field to further academic scrutiny.

In search of 'managerial work' : past, present and future of an analytical category

Based on a comprehensive review of literature, the paper examines how ‘managerial work’ as a fluid analytical category has been approached methodologically, theoretically and empirically for more than 60 years. In particular, it highlights the existence of competing scholarly understandings regarding its nature, performance, meaning and politics. The authors suggest that subsequent empirical investigations have too often worked, methodologically and theoretically, to slot in, and thus effectively reduce, the term to a particular pre-existing box, rather than exploring open-endedly the what and how, but also the why of ‘managerial work’ as a distinct mode of situated ordering. Having represented the concepts past and present by identifying four distinct research approaches reflected in representative publications, the authors suggest that more attention should be devoted to a mode of analytical departure that promises to address directly the suggested shortcomings in the literature. Specifically, it is argued that much could be gained if contemporary notions of practice were brought into the study of managerial work. To this end, the authors outline the contours of a practice-based approach as a sensitizing framework for understanding managerial work by highlighting the situated, relational, sociomaterial, meaning-making and consequence-oriented analytical foci the approach suggests, and suggesting a number of conjoint research questions, as well as acknowledging subsequent limitations.