Managing Medical Authority - by Daniel A Menchik (Hardcover)

About the Book

"How the authority of medicine is continuously shaped by relationships among physicians, industry, colleagues, and organizations Exploring how the authority of medicine is controlled, negotiated, and organized, Managing Medical Authority asks: How is knowledge shared throughout the profession? Who makes decisions when your heart malfunctions-physicians, hospital administrators, or private companies who sell pacemakers? How do physicians gain and keep their influence? Arguing that medicine's authority is managed in collegial competition across venues, Daniel Menchik examines the full range of stakeholders driving the direction of the field: medical trainees, clinicians, researchers, administrators, and even the corporations that develop groundbreaking technologies enabling longer and better lives.Menchik takes us into Superior Hospital to witness surgeries and executive negotiations. He moves outside the hospital to watch professional committees craft standards for treatments, case management, and professional ethics. At industry-sponsored meetings, he observes company representatives who train some experienced doctors on their technologies, while deterring others who they think might injure patients. Using an innovative ethnographic approach tying individual actions and their collective consequences, he considers how stakeholders ally across the various venues of medicine, even as they are sometimes pressed into competition within those venues. Menchik finds that these alliances and rivalries strengthen the authority of medicine as a whole. From place to place, and group to group, we see how a medical specialty renews and reinvigorates itself.Beginning within the walls of the hospital, and moving to the professional and commercial venues that shape it, Managing Medical Authority offers an agenda-setting take on the social organization of medical authority"--

Book Synopsis

How the authority of medicine is continuously shaped by relationships among physicians, industry, colleagues, and organizations

Exploring how the authority of medicine is controlled, negotiated, and organized, Managing Medical Authority asks: How is knowledge shared throughout the profession? Who makes decisions when your heart malfunctions--physicians, hospital administrators, or private companies who sell pacemakers? How do physicians gain and keep their influence? Arguing that medicine's authority is managed in collegial competition across venues, Daniel Menchik examines the full range of stakeholders driving the direction of the field: medical trainees, clinicians, researchers, administrators, and even the corporations that develop groundbreaking technologies enabling longer and better lives.

Menchik takes us into Superior Hospital to witness surgeries and executive negotiations. He moves outside the hospital to watch professional committees craft standards for treatments, case management, and professional ethics. At industry-sponsored meetings, he observes company representatives who train some experienced doctors on their technologies, while deterring others who they think might injure patients. Using an innovative ethnographic approach tying individual actions and their collective consequences, he considers how stakeholders ally across the various venues of medicine, even as they are sometimes pressed into competition within those venues. Menchik finds that these alliances and rivalries strengthen the authority of medicine as a whole. From place to place, and group to group, we see how a medical specialty renews and reinvigorates itself.

Beginning within the walls of the hospital, and moving to the professional and commercial venues that shape it, Managing Medical Authority offers an agenda-setting take on the social organization of medical authority.

Review Quotes

"Innovative and theoretically compelling. . . . Managing Medical Authority joins a short list of the most authoritative studies of professions while developing an important and actionable conceptual toolkit."---Daniel R. Morrison, Contemporary Sociology

"The questions that are both answered and raised within Managing Medical Authority render it a deeply captivating and thought-provoking book."---Lauren D. Olsen, Social Forces

About the Author

Daniel A. Menchik is associate professor of sociology at the University of Arizona.