1. OFFICIAL AGENTS AND THE LEGITIMATION OF SUFFERING.
- Author
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Voysey, Margaret
- Subjects
PLURALISM ,FAMILIES ,MEDICAL care ,CHILD rearing ,PUBLIC welfare - Abstract
In modern pluralist societies, notably Great Britain and the United States, there has been a growth of full-time expert agencies officially empowered to implement legitimation in particular institutions or sectors of society. Thus control of the family is variously the responsibility of genetic, marriage and child guidance counsellors as well as "generic" social workers, doctors, teachers and so on. In this paper, authors attempt to show how several official agents doctors, social workers, voluntary associations for the disabled and also family and friends may act to redefine the situation of parents with disabled children so that they may continue to appear as "good" parents acting in accordance with the prescriptions of the official morality of child-rearing or making appropriate use of its rhetoric. Medical science was presented as based on a "disease model," the distinctive nature of its explanations deriving from their being conceptualized in terms of the structure and functioning of the body. Secondly, parents' ideology, though expressed in common-sense terms, was shown as grounded also in various scientific legitimations.
- Published
- 1972
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