Sharon Boden

The concerns of school staff in caring for children with diabetes in primary school

Boden S, Lloyd CE, Gosden C, Macdougall C, Brown N, Matyka K. The concerns of school staff in caring for children with diabetes in primary school.

Greater Choice and Control? Health Policy in England and the Online Health Consumer

One health policy approach to addressing the demographic challenge of an ageing population with high levels of chronic disease is to encourage self-care. At the same time there have been shifts in the organisation of health services and practitioner-patient relations, to a model of ‘patient-centred’ care. The emergence of the internet over the last twenty years has coincided with these shifts in policy priorities to the self-management of long-term conditions and the centrality of the informed, expert user. Current policy seeks to achieve user empowerment through harnessing technology to provide ‘greater choice and control’. In this paper we assess the extent to which this aim is realistic from an examination of health queries submitted to an online enquiry service. Our data supports other research which shows that while empowerment does occur in the use of online health services, this is constrained and context dependent. Current health reforms in England are leading to a fragmented, marketised NHS, where competitive choice designed to drive quality improvement and efficiency savings is informed by transparent performance data and patient experience ratings, and with the notion of an empowered health consumer at its centre. It is therefore essential that policy makers are aware of the limits to online health consumer empowerment.

'Another Day, Another Demand': How Parents and Children Negotiate Consumption Matters

This paper discusses the various kinds of pressure placed on children to consume and how their parents view and deal with this. It focuses on the consumption of clothing, the marketing of ‘fashion’ to youngsters and the commercial opportunities presented to children to construct a particular image of themselves through their choice of attire. Related to these issues are the range of constraints placed upon childrens consumption as they desire to seek independence from their parents yet remain embroiled in their social networks where they seek belonging, conformity and inclusion. Leading on from this, the paper goes on to explore whether and to what extent childrens increasing engagement with consumer culture affects the parent-child relationship.

The risk management of childhood diabetes by primary school teachers

This article explores the attitudes of primary school staff in relation to managing children with diabetes. It reports the findings of a qualitatively orientated study in which we conducted in-depth, semi-structured face-to-face interviews with 22 staff that held a variety of positions in primary schools and had a range of experience of caring for children with diabetes. We consider the anxieties and apprehensions expressed to us by our interviewees (covering topics such as injecting/blood testing, and the reactions of parents to school decisions), in both their capacities as educators and, increasingly, frontline care-givers to other peoples children. The expansion and formalisation of healthcare responsibilities within the primary school is shown to have impacted upon the risk assessments made of children with diabetes. Analysis of the data therefore focuses on health related risk anxieties as they are played out in adult/child relations and in the specific context of the primary school.

Introduction: Consumerism, Romance and the Wedding Experience

Weddings are big news and big business. They were changed forever by the 1994 Marriage Act, which licensed approved premises for civil ceremonies in England and Wales. This Act was both a symptom and a source of wider underlying changes in society and in intimate relationships. The basic legal requirements necessary for a marriage to take place are certainly far removed from the catalogue of artifacts and rituals that now constitute the contemporary wedding experience.

The Wedding Fantasy: Consuming Emotions on the Big Day

This chapter takes as its focus the immediate pre-wedding build-up through to and including the ‘big day’ itself. To begin, I briefly sketch what I take to be the typical wedding narrative, following the chronology of events related to me by brides and grooms. Formative stages here, as we shall see, include the last few days and hours of preparation, the wedding morning, the final transformation into the bride, the ceremony and the reception speech.

‘Superbrides’: Wedding Industries and Consumer Cultures

This chapter examines the role of the media and commercial stakeholders in articulating and sustaining the tension between Romanticism, fantasy and rationality as key dimensions of wedding consumption. As a context setting exercise, I begin by highlighting the scale and scope of the wedding industry in an international context. Two types of media are then analysed as evidence of the development of a wedding consumer culture in Britain. First, I draw examples from the coverage of celebrity and unconventional weddings in the popular presses to reveal the criteria successful wedding occasions are judged upon. This section highlights the current media emphasis upon the wedding as a spectacular, within-reach consumer fantasy. I then provide a more sustained analysis of six British bridal magazines, part of the ideological output of the contemporary wedding industry, which do not exist in a vacuum from those other media sites transmitting wedding imagery. Such publications function to give meanings to the pre-wedding build-up as well as to the day itself. These meanings are inextricably tied to consumption and are evident in the construction of bridal identity and the commodification of wedding types.

A Never Ending Story? The Aftermath of Wedding Consumption

In this chapter I focus on the aftermath of wedding consumption. By and large, the later ramifications of any consumer behaviour remain an oversight in the literature, as few sociologists trek beyond the actual moment of consumption and few marketeers care about the consumer once she or he has consumed. And yet the effects and affects of consuming for a wedding exert a strong, continuing influence over the bride and groom long after the curtain has drawn on their own big day. This chapter therefore explores how the wedding and its associated consumption are evaluated in hindsight. In doing so, I argue that the wedding aftermath is a period of highly reflexive mentalistic exercise in which a Romantic ethic still appears to have some relevance. Yet, as we shall see, in no sense are such post-consumption experiences dislocated from commercial pressure, social structure and the dynamics of interpersonal relationships.

Romancing the Consumer: Campbell’s Romantic Ethic and Beyond

In the introduction to this book I alluded to a seminal text on consumption, Colin Campbell’s The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (1987), for firmly placing the issue of consumer desire on the consumption research agenda. His text throws the nature of consumer desire and its elusive satisfaction into critical relief, alongside the pre-acquisition phase of consuming and its aftermath. In its emphasis on the mentalistic dimensions of modern consumption it has also sought to understand consumer behaviour in relation to an underlying cultural logic — one, it is claimed, stemming from a commitment to Romanticism and its associated values. Throughout the text, consumption is emphasized as a creative, hedonistic activity in which imagination and emotions play pivotal roles.

Wedding Preparations: The Significance of Consumption

As we saw in Chapter 3, many weddings now have a different status from perhaps thirty years ago. What is now being celebrated is less the beginning of a romantic and sexual relationship than the confirmation of one that already exists. Moreover, at the same time divorce is prevalent in British society, a wedding industry continues to boom, with the average consumptive expenditure on the big day at an unprecedented high level. It is with this apparent paradox in mind that the following discussions proceed.