Showing papers by "Bryan S. Turner published in 1990"

Outline of a Theory of Citizenship

Abstract: The problem of citizenship has re-emerged as an issue which is central, not only to practical political questions concerning access to health-care systems, education institutions and the welfare state, but also to traditional theoretical debates in sociology over the conditions of social integration and social solidarity. Citizenship as an institution is thus constitutive of the societal community. These sociological debates typically start with an analysis of the conceptual framework of citizenship in the work of T.H. Marshall. This article reviews the standard objections to Marshall's concept of citizenship and the hyphenated society, and develops a critique of the unitary character of the concept of citizenship in the Marshallian tradition. There are in fact, as the etymological development of the concept itself demonstrates, several distinct forms of citizenship. In reply to a recent contribution by Michael Mann to the theory of citizenship, the article contrasts the history of citizenship in Germany,...

The interdisciplinary curriculum: from social medicine to postmodernism

Abstract: Academic specialisation has often been criticised, because it brings about a narrow and partial orientation to research and teaching Hence interdisciplinarity often appears to be a positive and alternative framework for the progressive reorganisation of higher education curricula This paper examines various aspects of the development of interdisciplinarity in relation to the medical curriculum, locating these changes in the social context of the development of scientific medicine These interdisciplinary perspectives are illustrated by an examination of four cases (social medicine, sociology of health and illness, the interdisciplinary research centre, and the postmodern melange) which necessarily imply some critical appraisal of the medical profession and its status in society, because they implicitly or explicitly suggest new approaches to the medical curriculum However, these four examples indicate that the notion of ‘interdisciplinarity’ covers a variety of very different perspectives on curriculum reform in higher education Social medicine and the sociology of health and illness have been typically critical evaluations of monodisciplinary assumptions about medical intervention and medical training By contrast, the research centre orientation, which followed the Rothschild Report, has been primarily a response to financial constraints The development of postmodernism in social theory has also involved a challenge to the unitary assumptions of monodisciplinarity, but there may be a convergence between the commercialisation of medicine and the emergence of postmodernistic criticism of the conventional medical curriculum, in which case interdisciplinarity will produce a fragmentary pastiche of disciplines rather than intellectual integration

The Anatomy Lesson: A Note on the Merton Thesis:

Abstract: In the sociology of science, the historical analysis of the rise of seventeenth-century experimental science has been dominated by the research of Robert Merton, who argued that Protestant asceticism paved the way for scientific world-views. Merton was criticized by L.S. Feuer who claimed that science was in fact the outcome of hedonism not asceticism. This article supports the Merton thesis on the basis of a note on the historical development of anatomical dissections with special reference to public dissections in Holland m the seventeenth century. The principal difficulty for both Merton and Feuer is that scientific medicine in pre-modern societies was not differentiated from either religion or law. The anatomy lesson was in fact a juridical and moral drama.

The talking disease: Hilda Bruch and anorexia nervosa

Abstract: In this note on anorexia nervosa, it is assumed that the sociology of health and illness must adopt a three-level model of explanation. We have to understand the phenomenology of illness within the...