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Retheorizing the Clinical Encounter: Normalization Processes and the Corporate Ecologies of Care

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New Directions in the Sociology of Chronic and Disabling Conditions

Abstract

The clinical encounter fascinates sociologists because it is a tremendously rich source of empirical knowledge about the conduct and character of contemporary societies. It is a vehicle for both macro-sociological interests about the social distribution of material resources and cultural capital, mapped along the axes of ethnicity, gender, class, age and religion, and at the same time a locus for micro-sociological investigations of the accomplishments of knowledge and practice, the making of meanings and identities, the relations between persons and technologies, and the narratives by which everyday life is socially constructed. Not only that, but in the clinical encounter chemistry, biology and psychology appear not as collaborative or competitor disciplines of enquiry, but as embodied and embedded realities that must be pragmatically negotiated by its participants, and interpreted sociologically. Thus, the clinical encounter is easily assigned the status of a technical and moral ’special’ place where deep existential questions and troubling experiential elements of human life get played out.

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Authors
  1. Carl May
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University College London Medical School, UK

    Graham Scambler

  2. Kings College London Dental Institute, UK

    Sasha Scambler

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© 2010 Carl May

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May, C. (2010). Retheorizing the Clinical Encounter: Normalization Processes and the Corporate Ecologies of Care. In: Scambler, G., Scambler, S. (eds) New Directions in the Sociology of Chronic and Disabling Conditions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230297432_7

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