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Open AccessJournal ArticleDOI

The cause of death vs. the gift of life: boundary maintenance and the politics of expertise in death investigation

Stefan Timmermans
- 01 Sep 2002 - 
- Vol. 24, Iss: 5, pp 550-574
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TLDR
In this paper, the authors investigated three different conflictual jurisdictional relationships between professions: a subordinated, a standardised and a commodified relationship, and evaluated the extent that they are able to preserve the mission of death investigators.
Abstract
In late modernity, conflicts about professional jurisdiction have gained in intensity because the emergence of new technologies can drastically alter the grounds for expertise. In the United States, medical examiners have the legal mandate to investigate and certify suspicious deaths, straddling the disparate worlds of public health and criminal justice. Over the last decade, procurement organisations fuelled by advances in immunology and surgical techniques have challenged medical examiners’ jurisdiction, requesting access to the corpse for organ and tissue transplantation purposes. Building further on Andrew Abbott's The System of Professions (1988), this article investigates jurisdictional relationships between professions when an emerging profession makes inroads on the jurisdiction of an established profession. Taking the vantage point of the established profession, I have distinguished three different conflictual jurisdictional relationships: a subordinated, a standardised and a commodified jurisdictional relationship. These relationships will be evaluated for the extent that they are able to preserve the mission of death investigators.

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Journal ArticleDOI

Three Lenses on Occupations and Professions in Organizations: Becoming, Doing, and Relating

TL;DR: It is suggested that occupations and professions can be understood through lenses of “becoming’, “doing”, and “relating” and introduced a three-part framework for conceptualizing occupational and professions to help guide future inquiries.
Journal ArticleDOI

Spare Parts: Organ Replacement in American Society

Robert E. McCabe
- 16 Jun 1993 - 
TL;DR: In Spare Parts, Renee Fox and Judith Swazey have updated us on their continued and lifelong study of the ethical, moral, social, and cultural processes of therapeutic innovation.
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When do interprofessional teams succeed? Investigating the moderating roles of team and professional identity in interprofessional effectiveness

TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigated the role of professional identity threat and team identity as moderators of the relationship between diverse composition and the performance of interprofessional teams in a tertiary referral hospital in New South Wales, Australia.
Journal ArticleDOI

Death Brokering: Constructing Culturally Appropriate Deaths

TL;DR: It is argued that medical death brokering persists in spite of challenges because medical experts offer increasingly flexible cultural scripts to render the end-of-life socially meaningful while accentuating death's existential ambiguity.
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Toward Realizing the Potential of Diversity in Composition of Interprofessional Health Care Teams: An Examination of the Cognitive and Psychosocial Dynamics of Interprofessional Collaboration

TL;DR: Interprofessional approaches to health and social care have been linked to improved planning and policy development, more clinically effective services, and enhanced problem solving; however, there is evidence that professionals tend to operate in uniprofessional silos and that attempts to share knowledge across professional borders are often unsuccessful.
References
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Book

Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity

Ulrich Beck, +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, Scott Lash and Brian Wynne describe living on the VOLCANO of CIVILIZATION -the Contours of the RISK SOCIETY and the Politics of Knowledge in the Risk Society.
Book

Professionalism Reborn: Theory, Prophecy and Policy

TL;DR: The Theory of the Professions: State of the Art as discussed by the authors is a theory of professionalism that is used in many aspects of professional life, such as the division of labor as social interaction, the Occupational Autonomy and Labor Market Shelters.
Book

Professional Powers: A Study of the Institutionalization of Formal Knowledge

TL;DR: Freidson's book is a concise introduction to the professions, challenging specialists with its puncturing of theoretically induced misconceptions and offering general readers a clear but critical entree to the theoretical literature concerning this central aspect of modern society as mentioned in this paper.
Book

Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death

Margaret Lock
TL;DR: In this article, the authors discuss the effects of accidental death trauma on the human body, including boundary transgressions, moral uncertainty, and the difficulty of reanimating the body after death.
Journal ArticleDOI

The Global Traffic in Human Organs1

TL;DR: A late‐20th‐century global trade in bodies, body parts, desires, and invented scarcities is mapped, inspired by Sweetness and Power, which traces the colonial and mercantilist routes of enslaving tastes and artificial needs.
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