We allow doctors to cut us open, to drive us into debt, to perform lethal injections. We let them allocate taxpayers' dollars for expensive tests, authorize periods of absence from work, and administer disability payments. We credential them with these personal and political rights because we attribute to them a mastery of specialized knowledge and a set of specific skills to apply it to individual cases. In this research I explain how these capabilities are acquired and practiced. Sociologists have explained the formation and evolution of the relevant institutions, yet there is no definitive study of how to understand respective practices. In The Logics of Practice: How Science Becomes Medicine, then, I show how doctors master a base of knowledge that is focused around a set of clinical issues, and translate this arcane knowledge into concrete clinical practice.
The problem is of explaining physicians' mandate, or, their definition -- for themselves and others -- of proper conduct with respect to the matters concerned in their work. Doing so involves demonstrating one has knowledge, and translating that knowledge into practice based on information from the patient. When a person comes in complaining of shortness of breath, doctors have to interrogate their knowledge base to make some inferences about what they ought to do, and translate that to a course of action. The premise of the dissertation is that the process of mastering a knowledge base and translating it into clinical practice is always mediated by a specific set of social organizations -- including training teams, the hospital, meetings with technology firms, and panels of elites who create professional guidelines. Physicians perform their mandate in the context of certain personal, positional, and situational logics that are located in the nature of these social scenes. In this project I ultimately propose a model for the analysis of practice in general and professional practice in particular. The case of medicine provides a proving ground for the development of better ways of analyzing practice than exist in sociology today.
The problem is of explaining physicians' mandate, or, their definition -- for themselves and others -- of proper conduct with respect to the matters concerned in their work. Doing so involves demonstrating one has knowledge, and translating that knowledge into practice based on information from the patient. When a person comes in complaining of shortness of breath, doctors have to interrogate their knowledge base to make some inferences about what they ought to do, and translate that to a course of action. The premise of the dissertation is that the process of mastering a knowledge base and translating it into clinical practice is always mediated by a specific set of social organizations -- including training teams, the hospital, meetings with technology firms, and panels of elites who create professional guidelines. Physicians perform their mandate in the context of certain personal, positional, and situational logics that are located in the nature of these social scenes. In this project I ultimately propose a model for the analysis of practice in general and professional practice in particular. The case of medicine provides a proving ground for the development of better ways of analyzing practice than exist in sociology today.
© 2008 Dan Menchik
