“… But … But I am Brown.” The Ascribed Categories of Identity: Children and Young People of Mixed Parentage

This paper explores the concept of the categorisation of social groups by looking at the issue of ascribed categories of identity for children and young people of mixed parentage. Our exploration of the knowledge-base in this area reveals that children and young people have clearly expressed views about their racial identity and that these views are broadly consistent across research studies. In essence, children and young people's expressed views are that they are not mixed-race, black or white, but are in fact brown. The emerging sociology of childhood and the government's current child participation agenda emphasise the centrality of children and young peoples' perspectives on the provision of services that seek to support them. Through this perception, which places children and young people's own understandings of their racial identity at the forefront of the analysis, we added fresh understandings to the existing data concerning ascribed categories of identity for children and young people of mixed parentage.     

‘Bourdieu’, medical elites and ‘social class’: a qualitative study of ‘desert island’ doctors

Sociologists of professions draw on Weberian theories of closure. However they have tended to ignore Bourdieu's work, which rejects Weberian notions of class and status groups as distinct ideal types and sees these concepts as inextricably linked. Bourdieu emphasises the importance of a class‐based habitus which generates orientations, inclinations and dispositions that organise practices and the perception of practice. For Bourdieu, because individuals perceive one another primarily through the status that attaches to their practices (through a symbolic veil of honour) they fail to perceive the real basis of these practices: the forms of capital that underlie the different habitus and enable their realisation. This article draws on interviews with 17 elite doctors appearing on a national (UK) radio show during which they choose eight discs to take to a desert island. According to Bourdieu, ‘nothing more clearly affirms one's “class”, nothing more infallibly classifies, than one's taste in music’. An analysis of the doctors' musical tastes and their mode of acquisition (largely, for these elites, via their family and education at independent schools), as well as other insights into their cultural capital reveals the importance of linking class and status when exploring professional status and prestige.     

‘Quality is job 1’– new directions for medical risk management

With the advent of managed care, the determination of who is a successful healthcare provider often depends on the selection process used by the managers of employee health plans and their managed care plans. Employee satisfaction and cost containment are factors relied on in selecting healthcare providers. This article discusses the risk management professional's increasingly important role in assisting healthcare providers in meeting the requirements of these third‐party decision makers.     

Poststructuralism and other ‘species’ in public health—a ‘Darwinian’ view

Abstract: The concepts and methods of poststructuralism are emerging as useful tools to increase our understanding of public health. This paper discusses poststructuralism within the context of a metaphoric ‘evolutionary ecology’ of knowledge (an epistemecology). It argues that claims for the importance of any programs (such as poststructuralism) are problematic. Using evolutionary and ecological metaphors, it suggests that public health may benefit from its advocates fostering the recombination of elements of knowledge to produce epistemes which adapt us congruently to the general and specific goals of public health, which should include a primary aim of minimising suffering. Choosing to act in an ethical way in regard to our construction and use of knowledge may be one way of achieving those aims. The term ‘ethical fitness’ is a way of conceptualising an evolving epistemic ethic.