Many notions of interprofessional collaboration appear to aim for the ideal of trouble‐free co‐operative communication between healthcare professionals. This study challenges such an ideal as too far removed from the complex and contested relations of power that characterise the albeit skilful everyday social interactions which take place within healthcare practice, along with the associated pragmatic compromises made by disempowered practitioners. It is noted that these may be facilitated by modes of comforting myth and denial. To underline this point, psychiatric illness (...) diagnosis is used as an illustrative example of how a historically powerful societal discourse can become thoroughly entrenched. The influence of a paradigmatically dominant discourse is shown to extend beyond the repetition of narrative within open dialogue and debate and to continue as tacitly reflected patterns within unconsciously habituated behaviour and durable artefacts that crystallise future affordances and limitations on action. However, the authors conclude by introducing optimistic theoretical speculation around the dynamic social mechanics of reflexive awareness and creativity, as these emerge within moments of significant dissonance between dialectically interacting layers of individually internalised and contextually embedded discourse, conversation and direct experience. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to theorize how materials can play an active, constitutive, and causally effective role in the production and sustenance of cultural forms and meanings. It does so through an empirical exploration of the Museum of Modern Art of New York (MoMA). The article describes the museum as an “objectification machine” that endeavors to transform and to stabilize artworks as meaningful “objects” that can be exhibited, classified, and circulated. The article explains how the extent to which (...) the museum succeeds in this process of stabilization ultimately depends on the material properties of artworks and, more specially, on whether these behave as “docile” or “unruly” objects. Drawing on different empirical examples, the article explores how docile and unruly objects shape organizational dynamics within the museum and, through them, the wider processes of institutional and cultural reproduction. The article uses this empirical example to highlight the importance of developing a new “material sensibility” that restores heuristic dignity to the material within cultural sociology. (shrink)

The essays in this topical issue illustrate the changing cultural form and function of the biopsyche disciplines – disciplines that are both sciences and technologies of selfhood. To varying degrees, each essay actively engages Paul Forman's thesis on modern and postmodern cultural valuations of science and technology. Forman invites those who read his work to view the cultural space framing science and technology in new ways.

The ability to (re)classify populations is a key component of state power, but not all new state classifications actually succeed in changing how people are categorized and governed. This article examines the French state’s partly unsuccessful project in 2005 to use a new classification—“psychic handicap”—to ensure that people with severe mental disorders received services and benefits from separate agencies based on a designation of being both “mentally ill” and “disabled.” Previous research has identified how new classifications can be impeded by (...) cultural and cognitive barriers to their adoption and struggles between professionals or administrators over their implementation. Drawing on 186 interviews, archival sources, and 13 months of observations across different French bureaucracies, I expand on this literature in two ways. First, I use the case of psychic handicap to argue that a new classification can also fail to achieve its intended effect when it constitutes a bureaucratically split personality—a combination of classifications that imply that individuals belong to two, mutually exclusive kinds of people. I show how psychic handicap embodied contradictory expectations about the behavior, characteristics, and institutional trajectory of people with mental disorders. Second, I identify how bureaucrats resolved these contradictions through mechanisms of refractory looping, outsourcing expertise, and classification by default, which in this case led to the reclassification of this population as simply “mentally ill.” This framework calls attention to how practical inconsistencies can limit the impact of new classifications, even absent overt resistance to their elaboration or implementation. (shrink)