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By focusing on the experiences of employees living with coeliac disease as evidenced in UK employment tribunal cases, this paper interrogates the way practices of exclusion are performed in legal and organisational contexts that purport to promote values of inclusion. In paying attention to how differences are constructed and negotiated, the paper unpacks the way organisational practices mobilise an array of workplace mechanisms to produce complex dynamics of exclusion. Applying Laclau and Mouffe’s logics of equivalence and difference, we show how questionable impulses and practices emerge in a workplace environment characterised by unclarity and vagueness. One impulse, for example, involves privatising and individualising the condition of employees with coeliac disease, giving rise to patronising and stigmatising attitudes that can turn them into victims. However, we also identify workplace mechanisms countering these tendencies, which can underpin forms of collective support in the struggle for recognition. Our study thus contributes to the body of sociological literature that pays attention to health‐related workplace injustices by challenging the purported promotion of health‐based inclusion through a focus on tribunal cases, leading to suggestions for further research into the way medical conditions are theorised and ‘lived’ at work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper intervenes in the dichotomous debate on the 'privatisation' of the UK's National Health Service (NHS). Whilst research suggests that involving private‐sector actors and principles deviates from the founding aims of the NHS to deliver equitable healthcare for all, the opposing argument to 'keep our NHS public' also limits understanding and alternative possibilities. Through focusing on maintaining overarching structures, these campaigns fail to address everyday medical practices that have long been critiqued by those allied with the sociology of health and illness. This paper draws on feminist critiques of public/private to expand the structural economic lens of mainstream political debates and explore how multiple forms of economic, social, cultural, and symbolic capital, operate in everyday healthcare practices. Through an historically‐informed ethnographic exploration of routine hip replacements, I find that capital itself emerges through relations between people and things, and that public/private boundaries play an integral role in forming these relations to instil value on particular patients and forms of labour, demarcating what kind of healthcare is given to whom. I therefore suggest future action should focus on assembling healthcare relations beyond the dualism of public/private categories, to create multiple safe places and relations for all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the social support provided by domestic animals to humans during the COVID‐19 pandemic. The study comprises interviews with 39 British and American pet owners during March 2021, the point at which the UK had recently emerged from the third national lockdown and US states were under various restrictions. A thematic network approach to data analysis revealed four global themes, illustrating how pets provided buffers to the stress of the pandemic, facilitated ontological security by maintaining a sense of routine and purpose, offered myriad types of emotional support and enhanced and enabled wider social support. Taken together, these results reinforce and extend knowledge pertaining to the importance of companion animals for social support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Schools are increasingly positioned as sites for intervening on the bodies and minds of children in the here and now in order to bring about health gain for the future. Public health interventions for schools bring together coalitions of commercial, statutory and philanthropic actors with children and their teachers and carers. Drawing on ethnographic case studies in London, UK, this paper explores two such interventions: one aiming to increase levels of physical activity and one to reduce exposure to air pollution. Both interventions not only evoke care for children's own current and future wellbeing but also fold in imaginaries of collective health futures, which orient and legitimise particular intervention logics and actions. As interventions unfold, children are recruited as monitors of health risks in the present. They are also positioned as risk ambassadors, who will leverage care about unhealthy environments and lifestyles across space, to risky domestic environments, and into imagined health futures. These 'futuring' school‐based interventions open up small alternative spaces in which imaginaries of collective and resistant public health practices emerge. However, in the here and now, children appear to be bearing a disproportionate burden of responsibility, as ambassadors for, and imagined saviours of, public and environmental health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the creation of safe spaces in which to explore and challenge dominant negative views of disabled children and young people, this co‐written paper presents unique insight into the meaning and impact upon disabled young people's lives of medical lenses and deficit models of disability. Bodies of work and dominant debates in medical sociology, disability studies and childhood studies have so far largely overlooked the experiences and positioning of disabled children and young people and have rarely involved them in the development or discussion of theory. Drawing on empirical data, and through a series of creative, reflective workshops with a UK‐based disabled young researchers' collective (RIP:STARS), this paper discusses areas of theoretical importance identified by the disabled young researcher collective—the validation of their lives, negotiation of their identity and acceptance in society. The implications, and possibilities, of platforming disabled children and young people's voices in theoretical debates are deliberated and are achieved through the yielding of privileged academic voice and the development of a symbiotic, genuine partnership which resonates with disabled young people and recognises them as experts in their own lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite an increased drive over the past two decades in Western societies to promote children's physically active play to improve their health, there are concerns that childhood has become less physically active. There are also fears that a previously naturally occurring aspect of childhood has become less authentically playful. Both trends highlight changes over time in the amount and type of play practiced by children and are often cited as consequences of generational shifts. Yet, research which analytically employs the concept of generation to connect changes to childhood with relevant social transformations is lacking. Inspired by Mannheim's conceptualisation of generations, this paper draws on life history interviews with 28 United Kingdom residents born between 1950 and 1994 to propose a fracturing of naturally occurring physical activity from childhood play. As shifts in childhood and parenting have become inextricably linked, this argument illustrates the impact of an intensification to parenting upon greater parental surveillance of increasingly organised forms of childhood physical activity at the expense of spontaneous play. Future physical activity policy should be sensitive to the social climate in which recommendations for children are made, as this places expectations upon parents due to how childhood is currently understood within neoliberal contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws attention to the health‐related work that disabled people do when engaging with rehabilitation services. Medical sociology has a rich history of looking at the 'illness work' that patients do, while disability studies scholars have explored the cultural value placed upon paid work and the effects on social status of being unable to work. Yet, a longstanding froideur between these two disciplines, which have fundamentally opposed ontologies of illness and disability, means that neither discipline has attended closely to the rehabilitation‐related work that disabled people do. The concept of 'adjusting' to illness highlights seemingly irreconcilable disciplinary differences. Yet this article argues that the notion of 'adjustment work' can elucidate the socio‐political character of the work disabled people do in their rehabilitation, which could create a more substantial and sustainable dialogue on this subject between disability studies and medical sociology. To make this case, we discuss interview data from the Rights‐based Rehabilitation project, which sought to explore disabled people's lived experiences of rehabilitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health inequalities impact sex‐variant people in highly differentiated ways. This is evidenced in much academic and activist intersex research documenting the highly specific forms of inequalities arising from misrecognition, discrimination and human rights abuses inherent to pathologised accounts of non‐normative bodies. Important theoretical work further interrogates the implications of sex variant subjectivities, identities and bodies for static or binary notions of both sex and gender. In this paper, we aim to contribute further to this scholarship. We draw upon feminist materialist and Deleuzean‐informed understandings of materials or matter to rethink debates over sex‐variant subjectivities, identities and bodies in relation to inequalities in health. We argue 'the turn to matter' and associated new materialist theories draw attention to the complex, dynamic relational assemblages and entanglements mutually constituting the affective, embodied and socio‐material worlds of intersex people. Informed by these theories, we propose that inequalities can be more fully addressed through a new health equity research agenda that is co‐produced with sex‐variant people. This agenda will enable a fuller exploration of the unsettling but transformative capacities of intersex matters and meanings with the contextually specific understandings of equity in relation to health and health care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the ways in which HIV specialists based in the United Kingdom (UK) construct, conceptualise and imagine their patient group via the concept of the 'imaginary', a notion encompassing the symbols, concepts and values through which people make sense of their social environment. In discussing their work with men who have sex with men (MSM), practitioners described patients as knowledgeable and highly adherent to treatment, yet apt to pursue hedonistic lives involving sex and recreational drugs. Recent innovations in treatment were formulated in terms of optimism and progress and the ascent of biomedical approaches was cast as an advance over former emphases on psychosocial interventions and attempts to facilitate behaviour change. In contrast to the imaginary of patients who were well‐informed and highly compliant with treatment, participants also sought to explain those who were not easily enfolded within modern treatment regimens or who were seen to be overly emotional. These patients, it was said, had some pre‐existing psychological problem or perhaps were especially vulnerable to societal pressures. Overall, the imaginary of the public was pervaded by therapeutic optimism, a sense of progress and an invigoration of biomedical themes in overcoming the challenges of delivering services to MSM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Genomic medicine has captured the imaginations of policymakers and medical scientists keen to harness its health and economic potentials. In 2012, the UK government launched the 100,000 Genomes Project to sequence the genomes of British National Health Service (NHS) patients, laying the ground for mainstreaming genomic medicine in the NHS and developing the UK's genomics industry. However, the recent research and reports from national bodies monitoring genomic medicine's roll‐out suggest both ethical and practical challenges for health‐care professionals. Against this backdrop, this paper, drawing on qualitative research interviews with general practitioners (GPs) and documentary analysis of policy, explores GPs' views on mainstreaming genomic medicine in the NHS and implications for their practice. Analysing the NHS's genomic medicine agenda as a 'sociotechnical imaginary', we demonstrate that whilst sociotechnical imaginaries are construed as collectively shared understandings of the future, official visions of genomic medicine diverge from those at the forefront of health‐care service delivery. Whilst policy discourse evokes hope and transformation of health care, some GPs see technology in formation, an unattainable 'utopia', with no relevance to their everyday clinical practice. Finding space for genomics requires bridging the gap between 'work as imagined' at the policy level and 'work as done' in health‐care delivery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a narrative review of the use of collective terminology in relation to race and health in Britain, with particular reference to the 'Black African' community. 'Black Africans' have been categorised in the 1991–2011 censuses with added free‐text in 2021 in response to user demand. However, the UK government is increasingly reporting data for the 'Black' pan‐ethnicity, especially in the even more generalised 'BAME' ('Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic') acronym in COVID‐19 pandemic reports. The consequences of this practice are addressed. Firstly, with respect to ethical challenges, Black Africans find their conscription by government into the term BAME offensive and do not accept it as a self‐descriptor. This labelling, which subsumes Black Africans' self‐assigned ethnicity in the census, and consequent misrecognition may be interpreted as a micro‐aggression (a term coined in the 1970s but used here to denote microinvalidation), as suggested in the current black activism of the 'Black Lives Matter movement'. Secondly, ONS has warned that concealed heterogeneity renders the pan‐ethnicities unreliably crude, making them scientifically inaccurate. Analysts are recommended to present ethnic group data for the full census classification where possible for reasons of validity and respect for the patient as arbiter of their ethnic group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidence is accumulating of the negative impact of the COVID‐19 pandemic and related public health measures on mental health. In this emergent field, there has been little research into the role of risk perception on depressive symptoms and the contribution of health‐care resources to model risk perception and mental health. The aim of this paper is to describe the relationship between individual‐level perception of risk and depression, controlling for a set of confounders and for country‐level heterogeneity. A cross‐sectional and observational online survey was conducted using a non‐probability snowball sampling technique. We use data on 11,340 respondents, living in six European countries (Italy, Sweden, United Kingdom, France, Poland, Czech Republic) who completed survey questionnaires during the first months of the pandemic. We used a fixed‐effect approach, which included individual and macro‐level variables. The findings suggest that a high proportion of people suffering from depression and heightened risk perception is positively associated with reporting depressive symptoms, even if this relationship varies significantly between countries. Moreover, the association is moderated by contextual factors including health‐care expenditure as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product, hospital beds for acute care, and number of medical specialists per head of population. Investment in health care offers a concrete means of protecting the mental health of a population living under pandemic restrictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The substantial literature in political economy and sociology has shown that the increasing importance of financial activities (financialisation) exhibits significant effects on many socioeconomic conditions. While these conditions are relevant to public health, the dominant focus of the literature has been centred on the impact of financial markets on health services and health‐care systems. This paper analyses how the financialisation of non‐financial corporations, real estate and pensions can worsen public health through the transformation of workplace and living conditions as well as financially dependent social groups' perception of health risk. Our analysis raises several questions which aim to provide the basis of a future research agenda on the effects of financialisation on public and global health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of affective landscapes in the formation of attendees' experiences at a re‐provisioned, integrated sexual and reproductive healthcare facility. The 'One‐Stop Shop' (OSS) is an example of the organisational shift towards integrated services occurring across the UK, bringing together in one clinic the historically discreet services of genitourinary medicine, HIV medicine and Family Planning. An ethnographically‐informed study of new spaces of care and changed organisation, this paper focuses on the experiences of 29 attendees as they made their way along the clinic's care pathways. Drawing on concepts of affect and atmosphere to augment the analytic lens of 'therapeutic landscapes', this paper demonstrates how various spaces of the clinic influenced attendees' experiences. A cramped, featureless 'holding pen', the foyer served to exacerbate pre‐existing anxieties while creating new fears. The main waiting room, an organisational sorting space, both soothed and aggravated attendees' concerns. Serving as an architectural feature to connect the old Victorian hospital with the new clinical extension, the atrium was experienced as a space to breathe, with an affective atmosphere that challenged the assumed unpleasantness of sexual health clinics. This paper demonstrates how affective landscapes of the clinic shape attendee experiences in a novel setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the considerable emphasis placed on informed choice, the management of health information has become an increasingly important part of living with chronic illness. This paper explores the intra‐familial dynamics of managing health information in the context of chronic illness. Drawing on 77 interviews with people affected by Multiple Sclerosis in the UK (patients, partners, family members and close friends), we show how families develop their own idiosyncratic information practices, including the careful, at times strategic, seeking, sharing and withholding of information. We describe how one individual, most commonly either the patient or their partner, often takes primary responsibility for managing growing quantities of health information. Doing this is a complex task, yet its dynamics within the family unit remain invisible and unacknowledged. In this paper we: (a) stress the importance of understanding information management in chronic illness as a collective process across all those affected, patients as well as carers; (b) conceptualise the process of managing health information in this context as 'health information work'; and (c) analyse it as part of the wider care practices families engage in and as a form of care in its own right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last three decades, sociomaterial approaches to the study of health care practices have made an important contribution to the sociology of health care. Significant attention has been paid to the role of technology and artefacts in health care and the operation of actor‐networks but less space has been given to questions of ontological multiplicity in health care practices. In this paper, we draw upon our study of patient experience data in five acute hospitals in England to illustrate how treating patient experience data as 'singular‐multiples' can enable useful insights into patient experience data work in health care organisations. Our data was generated during 12 months of fieldwork at five participating hospitals and included organisational documents, field notes, informal and formal interviews with frontline and managerial staff and patient representatives at the study sites. We use the examples of the Friends and Family Test (FFT) and the National Cancer Patient Experience Survey (NCPES) in England to consider the multiple nature of data as it is enacted in practice and the work data does when coordinated as an entity in the singular. We argue that, and discuss how, the sociomaterial insights we discuss here are relevant to health care quality and improvement research and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociological concern for rehabilitation remains limited. This paper aims to contribute to rehabilitation theory. It examines two units of a specialist rehabilitation hospital in the UK (amputee and neurological services) by focusing on the key actors involved – families, patients, staff – and the parameters shaping their relationships. The findings extend previous theoretical understandings of rehabilitation in three themes: normality, liminality and depersonalisation. We argue, first: normality is constantly negotiated amongst the different actors. This complicates existing works' critique of rehabilitation as reproducing the ideology of normality. Second, discourses produced during acute care shape the inpatient rehabilitation experience. This calls attention to the pre‐rehabilitation phase and complicates existing works' emphasis on the transition from inpatient stay to the time of discharge. Finally, inpatient rehabilitation is notable in rendering the adverse effects of depersonalisation apparent. It combines the bureaucracy of a regular hospital ward, with institutionalising aspects of long‐term care. These findings have a potential to enhance practice as well as knowledge. We call for a deeper sociological attention, combining theory‐building with empirical data for a better understanding of inpatient rehabilitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The decommissioning of a health‐care service is invariably a highly complex and contentious process which faces many implementation challenges. There has been little specific theorisation of this phenomena, although insights can be transferred from wider literatures on policy implementation and change processes. In this paper, we present findings from empirical case studies of three decommissioning processes initiated in the English National Health Service. We apply Levine's (1979, Public Administration Review, 39(2), 179–183) typology of decommissioning drivers and insights from the empirical literature on pluralistic health‐care contexts, complex change processes and institutional constraints. Data include interviews, non‐participant observation and documents analysis. Alongside familiar patterns of pluralism and political partisanship, our results suggest the important role played by institutional factors in determining the outcome of decommissioning processes and in particular the prior requirement of political vulnerability for services to be successfully closed. Factors linked to the extent of such vulnerability include the scale of the proposed changes and extent to which they are supported at the macrolevel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transitions into informal care roles are associated with various characteristics, for example gender and geographic proximity, but such associations are insufficient to explain role delegation, overlooking the interpersonal structure–agency nexuses that constitute role trajectories. This paper explores unequal role delegation within 7 families affected by dementia, presenting data from interviews with 7 people with dementia and 26 carers living in the community in the United Kingdom. Two key care roles are identified: the relatively un‐involved role of peripheral actors and the lynchpin role of main carers who take on most of the care tasks. These roles emerge from negotiations around a range of extraneous factors that collectively comprise cumulative baggage, including historic conflicts and childcare commitments. The unequal distribution of care reflects widely noted demographic associations with role delegation, but is enacted and justified through the interpersonal negotiation of personalised meanings regarding individual circumstances and suitability. Though deeply personal when taken at face value, these meanings imbibe sociocultural norms and political economies of care to structurally position family members in relation to each other and signpost appropriate candidates for caring roles, even before such care is required. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across the UK, wide‐ranging efforts have been made to enhance citizen access to psychological therapy. Clinical psychologists are key providers of and gatekeepers for therapy. This article is concerned with how clinical psychologists foster access (or not) to psychological care. More specifically, it interrogates how psychologists manage, and make decisions around, patient referrals. Following a referral, psychologists must resolve an uncertain situation: should they accept a referral and continue with an assessment? Thereafter, they must decide whether a patient is suitable for their service – and for therapy more generally. Certainty is synthesised against a backdrop of sometimes powerful pressures to meet service targets. Taking cues from medical sociology and science and technology studies (STS), this article interrogates some of the uncertainties around access to psychological therapy, and how decisions made by clinical psychologists involve negotiations of patient, service and professional ontologies. To do so, it draws on interviews with 40 psychologists across England and Scotland. The paper spotlights a professional group that is often absent from or only dimly lit within sociological observation and analysis: clinical psychology. Through attending to the discourses of psychologists, I extend conversations about uncertainty through a distinctive case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When a baby is diagnosed with a condition needing surgery they, and their family, start down an uncertain and unknown path. Living with uncertainty underpins every stage of the journey from hospital to home. These journeys span the highly technical to the mundane. They are likely to involve, at crucial points, medicalised and specialised neonatal and surgical care in paediatric centres of excellence where parents are mere spectators. Yet ultimately parents are able to take their baby home, confident experts in their daily care. Drawing on narrative interviews with 42 UK parents whose baby underwent neonatal surgery, this paper explores how parents navigate this uncertainty through acquiring experiential and lay knowledge and developing expertise in their baby's condition and treatment options. These conditions are rare. Building on sociological understandings of the work of chronic illness, as well as more recent work on newborn screening, sharing information online and examinations of experiential knowledge, we explore lay knowledge and expertise as it intersects with biomedical and surgical frontiers. We demonstrate how the development of expertise is an emergent, three‐stage process supported by both biomedical and lay knowledge and elucidate this process of knowledge‐building as a scaffold through which to manage uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UK National Health Service (NHS) is changing. Consecutive UK industrial strategies have supported the shift from an NHS that provides free‐at‐point‐of‐delivery healthcare to one that also facilitates research. Said to promote healthcare's triple aim of 'better health, better healthcare, and lower cost' (Wachter, 2016, 3), the digitisation of patient records is a core part in opening routine aspects of the health system to potential research. In this paper, we thematically analyse 11 policy documents and ask, how does the NHS discuss its decision to digitise patient records and what are the implications of such practices on the citizen? We document how (1) digitisation is presented as a collective endeavour for patients and NHS professionals, offering new possibilities for patients to participate in their own health and that of the population through research and, (2) digitisation contributes to the building of an efficient health system. Through this analysis we reflect on how discussions of digitisation present uncritically the potential of Electronic Health Records and big data analytics to improve care and generate wealth through research, and reconfigure patienthood, by placing research participation as a routine part of accessing NHS healthcare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the UK, nearly half of all cases of infertility involve a 'male-factor'. Yet, little empirical work has explored how men as men negotiate this terrain. Three interrelated concepts; 'hegemonic masculinity', 'embodied masculinity' and the linkages between 'masculinities' and male help-seeking, provide the theoretical framework that guided a qualitative study conducted with 22 men experiencing infertility. The paper explores men's propensity to delay their help-seeking in relation to infertility despite their desire for children. It also demonstrates how, in the context of infertility, the male body can be defined as both a failed entity in itself (unable to father a child) and a subordinated social entity (unable to measure up to hegemonic ideals) that characterises men's masculine identities. The paper also illustrates how men appear willing to accept responsibility for their infertility and adopt aspects of hitherto subordinate masculine practice. This does not, however, constitute the total unravelling of well understood and accepted expressions of masculinity. Finally, the paper demonstrates how infertility is perceived as having the potential to fracture current and even future relationships. Moreover, regardless of how well men measured up to other hegemonic ideals, ultimately they can do little to counteract the threat of other (fertile) men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Street‐level bureaucracy is an increasingly useful way to understand how strategic policy is implemented in day‐to‐day practice. This approach has uncovered the ways that individual health and social care practitioners work within institutional constraints to influence policy implementation at the micro‐level. Nonetheless, despite the diversity of settings where these street‐level bureaucrats (SLBs) work, little attention has been focused on the impact of place on policy delivery. This paper draws on empirical research to examine the ways that delivering government domestic abuse policy in the intimate space of the family home shapes the delivery of strategic policy in the everyday. Drawing on qualitative research with Health Visitors (HVs) in the UK in 2016, the study findings illuminate the ways that the material, socio‐spatial and idealised boundaries of the family home shape the implementation of policy. Key themes in the HV's narratives emerged as they described themselves as both a danger and in danger in the family home. In challenging the ontological security of the home (Giddens 1990) – privacy, security and control are key concepts here – HVs described how they shape their actions to achieve policy outcomes while simultaneously managing threats to the home, to professional identity and to self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) aims to improve national 'health and wealth' by providing infrastructural support to enable clinical research in National Health Service settings in England and Wales. Cognisant of the consequences of studies' failure to achieve required numbers of participants, it also actively campaigns to promote patient awareness of research, and willingness to participate in trials. In this paper, we analyse recent NIHR campaigns and policies designed to encourage patients to participate in clinical research to interrogate how they are implicated in the national bioeconomy. In doing so we expand the notion of 'clinical labour' to include the work of patient recruitment and highlight an emergent obligation on patients to contribute to research processes. Whereas once patient knowledge and experience may have been devalued, here we draw on the concept of 'assetisation' (Birch 2012) to explore the emergent relationship between healthcare system and patient as research participant. We consider how patients' contribution goes beyond the provision of standardised objects of valuation so that patients themselves may be perceived as assets to, not only recipients of, the national healthcare system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses a socio‐material approach, social practice theory, to provide new insights into the self‐management of chronic illness. It demonstrates how this theory can bridge arguments about the respective roles of social and individual influences, and how it can foreground an oft‐overlooked aspect of the issue – the demands of self‐care technologies and consequences for participation in social life. Drawing on interviews and focus groups with 25 young type‐1 diabetes outpatients in London, UK, the study points to the conflicts that occur when disease management technologies compete for time and space with the social practices of everyday life, and when self‐care tasks threaten to interrupt the flow of social life and make people feel 'left behind'. The paper concludes that young people are disabled by the contingent position of self‐care activities in daily life, which oblige them to compromise either their physical health or their immersion in the social world. This disabling effect would be mitigated if social practices were reorganised to make them more amenable to the time‐space requirements of disease management. A social practice theory lens can help throw light onto this issue and make a valuable contribution to the study of the self‐management of chronic illness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contributing to critical digital health research and the sociology of health consumption, this study investigates the phenomenon of self‐tracking and interpretation of consumer data via wearable technology and mobile fitness software applications (apps). It critically analyses qualitative data collected from members of running communities in the UK who are heavy users of apps and wearables. The study seeks to understand the meaning and practise of long‐term use of apps and wearables targeted at consumers interested in tracking fitness, and the collection of personal health information over time. The paper offers an interpretative perspective on runners as performance‐seeking fitness consumers engaged in long‐term self‐management of health. These consumers are driven by a profound motivation to visualise and embody a long‐term state of fitness. Participants were also hyper‐aware of advertising and promotional methods used to engage consumers. The findings raise concerns about the validity of personal fitness data, and how its collection promises improved personal health while visually promoting sought‐after fit bodies. Further research is required to understand the transformative impact of fitness‐tracking and how individuals negotiate personal classifications of health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus on patient autonomy in American and increasingly British medicine highlights the importance of choice. However, to truly honour patient autonomy, there must be both understanding and non‐control. Fifty‐eight semi‐structured in‐depth interviews were conducted with internal medicine physicians at three hospitals in the US and one in the UK. At hospitals where autonomy was prioritised, trainees equated autonomy with giving a menu of choices and felt uncomfortable giving a recommendation based on clinical knowledge as they worried that that would infringe upon patient autonomy. Employing Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action, this paper explores how physician trainees' communication practices of using purposefully graphic descriptions of resuscitation to discourage that choice prevent greater understanding and compromise non‐control. Central to this problem are also issues of colonisation of the life‐world by the system. Physicians are fully inculcated in their respect for autonomy but unintentionally resort to strategic forms of communication that prevent patients from adequately understanding their situation because trainees feel constrained against making recommendations. However, if the ideal of autonomy is to be realised, physicians might have to move towards practices that embrace a more authentic autonomy that fosters open communication that allows for co‐creation of consensus between doctors and patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Persistent health inequalities pose a continued research and policy challenge in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. Current approaches to health research and promotion are predicated on a distinction between wider, social structural causes and individual, health‐related behaviours often conceived of as lifestyle choices. Drawing on Bourdieu's theory of social practice, this paper develops an integrated perspective by observing associations between health and structured lifestyle practices. Using the UK Understanding Society household survey, a taxonomy of eight lifestyle clusters is identified, which exhibit significant health inequalities on a number of indicators. But the plurality of practices and subjective orientations inherent in the taxonomy reveals a finer, more complex differentiation of the social gradient in health. In addition, lifestyle appears to at least in parts mediate the relationship between social, material conditions and health. A feature of the taxonomy is that it admits a relational and contextual apprehension of health‐relevant, behavioural aspects within a more holistic notion of lifestyles. Based on this view, strategic approaches can be developed that respond to group‐specific situations and pathways and their varying roots in upstream or downstream domains of policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last decade has seen the development of an important literature on the contradictions between neoliberal norms of corporal citizenship and the forms of consumption that market-based food systems promote. This paper seeks to contribute to the literature by exploring the relationship between these contradictions and the increased prevalence of particular eating disorders (binge eating disorder ( BED) and bulimia nervosa). Within contemporary neoliberal food systems bingeing is increasingly normalised and consumption temporally disorganised. At the same time, neoliberal public health policy, and the wider 'health' entertainment media it legitimates, focuses on the promotion of 'correct' forms of consumer agency. Individuals who fail to manage consumption 'appropriately' are stigmatised. The growth of bulimia and BED can be related to the contradictory pressures that the food system and regime of corporal governance place on individuals. The paper also seeks to explore how the increased medicalisation and biomedicalisation of eating since the 1980s fits within a broader neoliberal governance strategy. By medicalising key social problems the neoliberal state depoliticises these issues. Medicalisation and biomedicalisation obscure the role of capitalism in generating these problems and encourage a focus on individual dysfunction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prescribing is the most common healthcare intervention, and is both beneficial and risky. An important source of risk in UK general practice is the management of 'repeat prescriptions', which are typically requested from and issued by non-clinically trained reception staff with only intermittent reauthorisation by a clinical prescriber. This paper ethnographically examines the formal and informal work employed by GPs and receptionists to safely conduct repeat prescribing work in primary care using Strauss's (1985, 1988, 1993) concept of 'articulation work' across eight UK general practices. The analytical lens of articulation work provided an investigative framing to contextually map the informal, invisible resources of resilience and strength employed by practice team members in the achievement of repeat prescribing safety, where risk and vulnerability were continually relocated across space and time. In particular, the paper makes visible the micro-level competencies and collaborative practices that were routinely employed by both GPs and receptionists across different socio-cultural contexts, with informal, cross-hierarchical communication usually considered more effective than the formal structures of communication that existed (e.g. protocols). While GPs held formal prescribing authority, this paper also examines the key role of receptionists in both the initiation and safe coordination of the repeat prescribing routine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Biomedical research aimed at the development of therapies for chronic and late‐onset conditions increasingly concentrates on the early treatment of symptom‐less disease. This broad trend is evidenced in prominent shifts in contemporary dementia research. Revised diagnostic criteria and new approaches to clinical trials propose a focus on earlier stages of disease and prompt concerns about the implications of communicating test results associated with the risk of developing dementia when no effective treatments are available. This article examines expectations of the implications of learning test results related to dementia risk, based on focus group research conducted in the UK and Spain. It points to the extended social and temporal aspects of the dementia risk experience. Three key dimensions of this risk experience are elaborated: living ‘at risk’, represented in efforts to reduce risk and plan for the future; ‘with risk’, through vigilance towards cognitive health and earlier or prolonged contact with healthcare services; and finally, ‘beyond risk’ through a cessation of the self in its current social, legal and financial form. A virtual abstract of this paper can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_979cmCmR9rLrKuD7z0ycA [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article demonstrates the relevance of animals to medical sociology by arguing that pet owners' accounts of veterinary decision-making can highlight key sociological themes which are important to both human and animal health. Based on semi-structured interviews, the article argues that interspecies 'kinship' allows for the extension of sociological claims regarding altruism, self-interest and mutuality from human blood donation to companion animal blood 'donation'. Furthermore, this study extends sociological understanding of the human-animal bond by showing how the dog's status as kin meant they were expected to donate blood, and that the act of donation itself represents an important opportunity for family 'display'. However, owners who do not or cannot donate blood themselves describe pet blood donation as an opportunity to lessen associated feelings of guilt or obligation through 'doing good by proxy'. These findings raise critical sociological and ethical questions concerning the risks and benefits of donation, and for how we understand third-party decision making. Finally, the article argues for the close entanglement of human and animal health, and concludes that sociologists of health and medicine should explore the radical possibility that decision-making in healthcare more generally might be influenced by experiences at the veterinary clinic, and vice versa. (A Virtual Abstract of this paper can be viewed at: ) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]