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JournalISSN: 1477-8211

Social Theory and Health 

Palgrave Macmillan
About: Social Theory and Health is an academic journal published by Palgrave Macmillan. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Medical sociology & Social determinants of health. It has an ISSN identifier of 1477-8211. Over the lifetime, 461 publications have been published receiving 9757 citations. The journal is also known as: STH & Social theory and health.


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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This review article focuses on the concept of patient engagement that encourages patients to take up the new digital media technologies to engage in self-monitoring and self-care, or what I term ‘the digitally engaged patient’.
Abstract: The phenomenon of digital health has emerged as a key dimension of contemporary healthcare policy and delivery in many countries. This review article focuses on one aspect of digital health discourses: the concept of patient engagement that encourages patients to take up the new digital media technologies to engage in self-monitoring and self-care, or what I term ‘the digitally engaged patient’. A critical approach is adopted to examine the sociocultural dimensions of eliciting patients to become ‘digitally engaged’ in their own medical care and preventive health efforts. It is argued that the techno-utopian discourses articulated in the mainstream healthcare policy literature concerning the possibilities and potentialities afforded by digital health technologies do not acknowledge the complexities and ambivalences that are part of using self-monitoring and self-care technologies for monitoring health and illness states, both for patients and for healthcare providers. These include the surveillance and disciplinary dimensions of using these technologies, the emotions and resistances they provoke, their contribution to the burden of self-care and the invisible work on the part of healthcare workers that they require to operate.

479 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: It is argued that m-health technologies produce a digital cyborg body that is willing and able to act on the health imperatives issuing forth from the technologies and to present their body/self as open to continual measurement and assessment.
Abstract: The new mobile wireless computer technologies and social media applications using Web 2.0 platforms have recently received attention from those working in health promotion as a promising new way of achieving their goals of preventing ill-health and promoting healthy behaviours at the population level. There is very little critical examination in this literature of how the use of these digital technologies may affect the targeted groups, in terms of the implications for how individuals experience embodiment, selfhood and social relationships. This article addresses these issues, employing a range of social and cultural theories to do so. It is argued that m-health technologies produce a digital cyborg body. They are able to act not only as prostheses, but also as interpreters of the body. The subject produced through the use of m-health technologies is constructed as both an object of surveillance and persuasion, and as a responsible citizen who is willing and able to act on the health imperatives issuing forth from the technologies and to present their body/self as open to continual measurement and assessment. The implications of this new way of monitoring and regulating health are discussed.

331 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors argue that attempts to erase uncertainty around the body, health and size/weight/fatness may be ethically problematic, not least because it can lead to forms of size discrimination and oppression that, ironically, may propel some people towards ill-health via disordered relationships with food, exercise and the body.
Abstract: In recent years, significant attention has been given in the popular and academic press to an ‘obesity crisis’ that, purportedly, is both ever increasing and sweeping across the western world. In this paper, we raise a number of ethical issues about the ways in which discourses around this crisis have been socially constructed and publicly represented. We begin by outlining the ways in which these discourses seem to offer ‘certainty’ and ‘authority’ (of ‘fact’ and knowledge) from within the research field. Yet, as others have pointed out, on closer inspection few such certainties are to be found. We argue that attempts to erase uncertainty around the body, health and size/weight/fatness may be ethically problematic, not least because it can lead to forms of size discrimination and oppression that, ironically, may propel some people towards ill-health via disordered relationships with food, exercise and the body.

270 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, a re-examination of the concept of stigma as applied to health and illness is presented, where the author's hidden distress model of epilepsy is outlined and subject to critique under the headings of conceptual decisions, theoretical context, and biographical impact.
Abstract: This paper comprises a re-examination of the concept of stigma as applied to health and illness. It takes as its point of departure the author's hidden distress model of epilepsy posited in the 1980s. This model is outlined and subject to critique under the headings of conceptual decisions, theoretical context, and biographical impact. It is argued that although the model retains partial validity, its principal weaknesses are its neglect of important sociological questions more commonly posed since its formulation. An examination of these questions is followed by a consideration of stigma relations oriented towards a re-framing of stigma more appropriate for a changed, and changing, social world. A core contention is that interactionist theories of deviance and stigma alike focused almost exclusively on institutional and symbolic orders and paid scant attention to social structures and axes of power. The paper concludes with a provisional re-working of the hidden distress model of epilepsy that takes account of this contention.

219 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors propose an institutional theory of health inequalities, which conceptualizes the welfare state as an institutional arrangement, a set of "rules of the game" that distributes health.
Abstract: Social inequalities in health endure, but also vary, through space and time. Building on research that documents the durability and variability of health inequality, recent research has turned towards the welfare state as a major explanatory factor in the search for causes of health inequality. With the aims of (i) creating an organizing framework for this new scholarship, (ii) developing the fundamental-cause approach to social epidemiology and (iii) integrating insights from social stratification and health inequalities research, we propose an institutional theory of health inequalities. Our institutional theory conceptualizes the welfare state as an institutional arrangement – a set of ‘rules of the game’ – that distributes health. Drawing on the institutional turn in stratification scholarship, we identify four mechanisms that connect the welfare state to health inequalities by producing and modifying the effects of the social determinants of health. These mechanisms are: redistribution, compression, mediation and imbrication (or overlap). We describe how our framework organizes comparative research on the social determinants of health, and we identify new hypotheses our framework implies.

173 citations

Performance
Metrics
No. of papers from the Journal in previous years
YearPapers
20232
202211
202143
202033
201926
201826