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In this paper we examine the application of informed consent to ethnographic research in health care settings. We do not quarrel with either the principle of informed consent or its translation into the requirement that research should only be carried out with consenting participants. However, we do challenge the identification of informed consent with the particular set of bureaucratic practices of ethical review which currently operate in Canada, the US and elsewhere. We argue that these anticipatory regulatory regimes threaten the significant contribution of ethnographic research to the creation of more efficient, more effective, more equitable and more humane health care systems. Informed consent in ethnographic research is neither achievable nor demonstrable in the terms set by anticipatory regulatory regimes that take clinical research or biomedical experimentation as their paradigm cases. This is because of differences in the practices of ethnographic and biomedical research which we discuss. These include the extended periods of time ethnographers spend in the research setting, the emergent nature of ethnographic research focus and design, the nature and positioning of risk in ethnographic research, the power relationships between researchers and participants, and the public and semi-public nature of the settings normally studied. Anticipatory regulatory regimes are inimical to ethnographic research and risk undermining the contribution of systematic inquiry to understanding whether institutions do what they claim to do, fairly and civilly and with an appropriate mobilisation of resources. We do not suggest that we should simply ignore ethics or leave matters to the individual consciences of researchers. Rather, we need to develop and strengthen professional models of regulation which emphasise education, training and mutual accountability. We conclude the paper with a number of suggestions about how such professional models might be implemented. Keywords: Ethics; Informed consent; Ethnography; Research; Regulation; Ethical review

The charge of medical imperialism emerged from the critique, albeit one based on very little evidence, that doctors were forever seeking to extend their power and authority as control agents in their own interests and those of capital and/or patriarchy. The encirclement of medicine, on the other hand, describes how medicineEs growing wealth and power gave rise to a huge variety of professional parasitism, particularly the rise in litigation.

It is believed that 'social precognition' is the forerunner of new scientific and technological developments such as extended life or immortality. Life-extension has been explored in depth by creative writers, and they emphasize the threat of new kinds of inequality. The quality of a longer life is also questioned.

The role of learned societies, mutual organisations of scholars with a common interest in an academic discipline or research field, is a poorly understood part of the ecosystem for knowledge exchange and dissemination. As such, that role is vulnerable to the unintended consequences of actions by other institutions within this ecosystem. This article reports a study of the social science learned societies operating in the UK in 2012/13. It describes their current activities and sustaining revenue streams, develops a methodology for documenting these, and establishes a baseline for future work to assess the impact of changes in their organisational environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The system of pre-emptive ethical regulation developed in the biomedical sciences has become a major threat to research in the humanities and the social sciences (HSS). Although there is growing criticism of its effects, most commentators have tended to accept the principle of regulation. This paper argues that we should not make this concession and that ethical regulation is fundamentally wrong because the damage that it inflicts on a democratic society far exceeds any harm that HSS research is capable of causing to individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a report on an Academy of Social Sciences debate held on 15 March 2006. The debate concerned the nature, character and development of the social sciences. Four leading social scientists were asked to reflect upon the nature of the social sciences in the light of various transformations in both intellectual thought and in those processes that seem to be restructuring human life as we move into the 21st century. These changes in different ways seem to problematise the idea of what Bruno Latour refers to as a purified realm of social relations separate from other spheres and around which a social science(s) can be developed. Is there a distinct realm of the social and if there is what is it? What is the relationship between such a social realm and other domains? What does this imply for the kind of social science that might be undertaken? These questions were presented to the Academy debaters and all came up with interestingly different responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most curious omissions in the sociology of work and occupations is what would seem to be one of the most basic questions: When is an occupation an occupation? While there have been recent attempt to explore the issue by examining the history of census categories,[1] these represent the end-point of the process at which new occupations receive official recognition and legitimation. My purpose in this paper is to discuss how occupations form and come to be recognized as such. The creation of health visiting between 1850 and 1919 will be taken as a case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Herbert Spencer was the most influential Anglophone sociologist of the nineteenth century, but his contributions are now largely forgotten. It is argued, however; that the clarity of his understanding of the use of biological metaphors in sociology gives his work a power which is worth rediscovering. This proposition is pursued through a discussion of his treatment of the professions and their role in industrial societies. His approach is compared with the "ecological" perspective of sociologists in the Chicago tradition, notably Andrew Abbott. it is suggested that Spencer's work rests on an alternative interpretation of the ecological model; this opens the way to an under- standing of the regulative structures of "the system of the profession," which fills a major gap in Abbott's account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the negotiated order approach to organizational analysis in qualitative sociology. The approach represented in the concept of "negotiated order" tends to lead to a focus on the species rather than on the environment. Both, however, need to be embraced, by sociologists as much as by actors. Sociologists turnout to be rather good teachers, or at least rather good at producing appropriate documentary evidence to back up their claims to being good teachers. The author suspects that all studies of the social construction of data have given sociologists an edge in the generation of paper to fit performance indicators. Overall, sociology seems to be around the middle of the research rankings, which is about what would be expected from a discipline that is heavily represented in 1992 universities with a limited research tradition. For a discipline so identified with collectivism, sociologists are remarkable individualists who remain reluctant to learn from their own discipline's work. They know the importance of teamwork in successful organizations and they reject the lessons for their own.

This paper reviews some of the contributions of conversational analysis and argues that its range of questions has been unduly restrictive. In particular, it is contended that its goals cannot be achieved without some reference to contextual features of a kind which have traditionally interested ethnographers, although it may offer a more rigorous methodology. These arguments are illustrated and developed through an analysis of speech-exchange in tutorials in a school of health visiting. It is concluded that the restoration of a comparative focus and a re-examination of Sacks' original writings may open important avenues for the empirical grounding of statements about wider social structures and their realisation in everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]