Robert Dingwall
Biographic Data
| ID | 88309 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Robert Dingwall |
| GIVEN NAMES | Robert |
| FAMILY NAME | Dingwall |
| SIGNATURE | DINGWALL R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Nottingham |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1588-3796 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 120 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 672 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 118 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1974 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
Can a code of professional ethics influence the supply of substandard and falsified medicines? Insights from Ethiopia
Substandard and falsified (SF) medicines are serious global health problems. Their high prevalence is a threat to public health in resource-limited settings. It is assumed that professionals will uphold specific standards of behaviour to protect the public interest and maintain trust. This study assesses whether a professional ethical code can serve as an effective way to prevent and respond to SF medicines by enhancing ethical behaviours in prac…
Ethics regulation and sociology in France
The French research ecosystem long resisted extending the ethics regulation processes established for biomedical science into the social sciences. This is now changing. This history of resistance is examined, together with the alternatives proposed. These include self-regulation by professional associations. Consideration is also given to the wider legal environment for French social sciences, particularly the laws on defamation and privacy, whic…
Can Systemic Corruption be Prevented by Legal Means? The Market for Pharmaceuticals in Southern Ethiopia
Some international and national regulatory and policy actors assume thatstrengthening domestic laws and tightening enforcement measures will besufficient to reduce the extra-legal supply of medicines, whether legal, sub-standard, or falsified, to patients in low- and middle-income countries. Thispaper uses a qualitative study of the pharmaceutical market in SouthernEthiopia to argue that this assumption is unjustified, given the commonlack of ins…
Misrepresenting Pragmatism
Substandard and falsified medicines in African pharmaceutical markets
Ethical moments and institutional expertise in UK Government Covid-19 pandemic policy responses
Background: The emergency response to the COVID-19 pandemic has required a rapid acceleration of policy decision making, and raised a wide range of ethical issues worldwide, ranging from vaccine prioritisation, welfare and public health ‘trade-offs’, inequalities in policy impacts, and the legitimacy of scientific expertise. Aims and objectives: This paper explores the legacy of the pandemic for future science-advice-policy relationships by inves…
The Historical Foundations of Symbolic Interactionism
This chapter models a symbolic interactionist approach to the history of symbolic interactionism. It begins with a discussion of the term ‘symbolic interaction’ as devised by Herbert Blumer and the limits of its applicability to the body of work that represents this tradition. This owes at least as much to borrowings from plant ecology and evolutionary theory by sociologists in Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s, with influences from Charles Darwin a…
‘Don’t mind him - he’s from Barcelona’
Health policy is a matter of concern for all citizens in modem societies. The health care system is one of the few institutions that virtually everybody will use at some point in their lives and, consequently, will be called upon to pay for. The precise mechanisms of payment and service delivery may vary but only the most marginal members of our society will avoid them. Process evaluation demands a methodology which is capable of capturing the dy…
Science, society, and policy in the face of uncertainty
The COVID-19 pandemic has had enormous effects on health, wellbeing, and economies worldwide. Governments have responded with rapid and sometimes radical public health interventions. As nations grapple with the question of how to regain normality without unnecessarily endangering lives or healthcare systems, some scientists have argued for policies to encourage or compel the use of face coverings in community (non-clinical) settings, despite ackn…
Understanding “corruption” in regulatory agencies
Corruption is a relatively neglected topic in studies of regulatory agencies. The label is applied to a wide range of deviations from behavioral standards ultimately derived from Weber's account of the ideals of Prussian bureaucracy. This paper draws on a study of the work of Saudi Food Inspectors to argue that it is unhelpful to reduce a complex phenomenon to simple allegations of malpractice that can be managed by disciplinary sanctions. Our da…
The Future as a Sociological Problem
The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Health, Illness, Behavior, and Society
editorial reviewed
The ceremonial order of the clinic
This title was first published in 2001. A classic ethnographic study of the interactions between paediatricians and parents of children thought to be neurologically handicapped. Strong used this work to systematize the often chaotic ideas of Erving Goffman, to explore the connections between micro and macro analysis in sociology and to reflect on the nature of medical practice in modern liberal societies. The book stands as a testament to Strong’…
Professions and the Social Order
The study of professions has been dominated by Anglo-American models, with their focus on a small group of legally licensed occupations. The field has recently shifted, mainly through studies of European experience, to a wider examination of the social management of expert workers. Very little has been written about developments in Africa and their implications for the way in which we might think about professions. This paper presents a case stud…
Social sciences lose out again in Common Rule reform
Medical Sociology and Genetics
Medical sociology is concerned with genetics in two main ways: its explanations of human behavior and its impact on the health sector. Over the last decade, developments in genetics have attracted considerable interest from medical sociologists, as they affect a wide range of topics within the discipline, such as deviance, health provision, and patient–professional interaction and technology
Sociology and Social Research (RLE Social Theory)
A social science which has become so remote from the society which pays for its upkeep is ultimately doomed, threatened less by repression than by intellectual contempt and financial neglect. This is the message of the authors of this book in this reassessment of the evolution and present state of British sociology. Their investigation analyses the discipline as a social institution, whose product is inexorably shaped by the everyday circumstance…
The Wiley-Blackwell encyclopedia of health, illness, behavior, and society
Foreword to Special Issue on Erving Goffman
Symbolic Interaction does not make a habit of publishing special issues. However, when Dmitri Shalin approached us with the proposal for this issue, the editorial team recognized the unique nature of the material that he was proposing to make available. This issue showcases the increasing richness of the online Erving Goffman Archives http://cdclv.unlv.edu//ega/index.html, curated from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, a leading centre for s…
Harold Garfinkel
"This book is a concise intellectual biography of Harold Garfinkel, a key figure in 20th-century social science. Garfinkel is practically synonymous with ethnomethodology, an approach that since the 1960s has led to major analytic and methodological developments in sociology and other disciplines. This introduction to Garfinkel explores how he developed ethnomethodology under the influence of Talcott Parsons and Alfred Schutz, situates it within …
Embedded regulation
This paper asks why an officially unregulated market in pharmaceuticals in a least developed country, Djibouti, behaves as if it were strictly regulated, with limited access to a small number of high‐cost drugs. We use Actor‐Network Theory (ANT) to show that the explanation is more complex than critics of the international pharmaceutical industry have supposed. Regulation and property rights generated in developed countries have become embedded i…
Introduction
Infectious disease has re-emerged as a public health threat in an increasingly globalised era, adding trans-national actors to traditional national and local government actors. This special issue showcases new sociological work in response to this challenge. The contributors have investigated the social construction of new and re-emerging diseases; the development of surveillance systems, public health governance; the impact of scientific/technic…
Medical Sociology and Genetics
The rapid progress in genetic science has attracted considerable interest among medical sociologists (Conrad & Gabe 1999; Pilnick 2002a). The basis of genetics is the observation that the biological constitution of all living things – plants, animals, fish, insects, bacteria, humans, etc. – is shaped by a chemical called DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) found in the nuclear material of the cells from which they are all made. The various ways in which …
Sociology and Social Research
Peter Conrad, The Medicalization of Society
Informed consent, anticipatory regulation and ethnographic practice
"Atrocity Stories" and Professional Relationships
It is argued that social interaction involves the reciprocal typification of parties to any encounter in the light of the social theories which those parties have available to them. One element of such theories is a conception of the social structure of one's society, including a taxonomy of occupations. Two problems are generated within this taxonomy, that of inclusion, defining what properly falls within some category, and that of exclusion, de…
The ceremonial order of the clinic
This title was first published in 2001. A classic ethnographic study of the interactions between paediatricians and parents of children thought to be neurologically handicapped. Strong used this work to systematize the often chaotic ideas of Erving Goffman, to explore the connections between micro and macro analysis in sociology and to reflect on the nature of medical practice in modern liberal societies. The book stands as a testament to Strong’…
Introduction
Infectious disease has re-emerged as a public health threat in an increasingly globalised era, adding trans-national actors to traditional national and local government actors. This special issue showcases new sociological work in response to this challenge. The contributors have investigated the social construction of new and re-emerging diseases; the development of surveillance systems, public health governance; the impact of scientific/technic…
Categorization in accident departments
Children form a significant proportion of accident services' clientele but have received relatively little attention in the growing ethnographic literature on such organizations. This paper uses data from observation and interviews in four English accident departments to review Jeffery's influential analysis of medical staffs categorization of patients. After pointing to certain logical difficulties with this account, it is argued that an analysi…
Argumentative Talk in Divorce Mediation Sessions
Increasingly, mediation is used as an alternative to institutionalized forms of conflict resolution in which settlements are imposed by judges, arbitrators, or other neutral adjudicators. To assess the equity and effectiveness of the various types of mediation, it is first necessary to explain how mediators and disputants manage their interactions. In this paper the authors analyze the management of arguments in sessions recorded at a divorce med…
Selective Facilitation
Serious criticisms have been raised about divorce mediators' claim that they act as purely neutral facilitators of party-driven agreements. This paper reports on a study, based on tape recordings of mediation in the United Kingdom, intended to describe the strategies used by mediators and clients in the attempt to resolve disputes. It identifies a technique, labeled "selective facilitation," through which clients may be steered in particular dire…
Health and the Division of Labour
Risk Society
The relation between theory and empirical data in sociology and social policy is explored through a critique of Ulrich Beck's influential book, Risk Society . Consideration is given to the extent to which a book that purports to describe contemporary societies in general is actually rooted in the unique circumstances of postwar Germany. The various arguments of Risk Society are reviewed and tested against relevant empirical reports from England. …
The Interactional Study of Organizations
The article reviews recent perspectives on the study of organizations, including negotiated order and the "new" organizational theory. It argues that both are inherently limited by their failure to address certain methodological problems in the relationship between theory, analysis, and data. The answer may lie in a more detailed consideration of the role of language and the possiblity of inspecting it for evidence of the devices employed by orga…
Ethics and Ethnography
An Introduction to the Social History of Nursing
In recent years the study of nursing history in Britain has been transformed by the application of concepts and methods from the social sciences to original sources. The myths and legends which have grown up through a century of anecdotal writing have been chipped away to reveal the complex story of an occupation shaped and reshaped by social and technological change. Most of the work has been scattered in monographs, journals and edited collecti…
Orchestrated Encounters
This paper reviews some of the contributions of conversational analysis and argues that its range of questions has been unduly restrictive. In particular, it is contended that its goals cannot be achieved without some reference to contextual features of a kind which have traditionally interested ethnographers, although it may offer a more rigorous methodology. These arguments are illustrated and developed through an analysis of speech-exchange in…
Let's dance
After the Interview
Contemporary legends, rumours and collective behaviour
This paper demonstrates the potential interest for the sociological understanding of medicine and health as social institutions of the qualitative study of collective behaviour. It takes, as a case study, the transformation of a widely-circulating contemporary legend, 'The Missing Kidney' into a rumour in Nottingham, and elsewhere in the United Kingdom, in 1992. Possible methodological approaches and interpretations are considered, making particu…
Context and Method in Qualitative Research
Accomplishing Profession
Turn off the oxygen
Biological Determinism and Symbolic Interaction
This article discusses current claims to have demonstrated a biological basis for elements of human behavior. It argues that many of these are seriously flawed by their misunderstandings of the nature of culture and social interaction, which leads to the adoption of an inappropriate realist epistemology. These issues were extensively debated during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century when the intellectual and institutional boundaries …
Professional Occupations in the UK and Europe
(2002). Professional Occupations in the UK and Europe: Legitimation and Governmentality. International Review of Sociology: Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 159-171
Notes Toward an Intellectual History of Symbolic Interactionism
The Influence of Popular Cultural Imagery on Public Attitudes towards Cloning
This article shows how public attitudes towards cloning and geneticallymodified food and crops are influenced by dystopian science fictionliterature, films, images and metaphors. We analyse a body of textsproduced in the wake of the announcement of the successful cloning of Dollythe sheep by the Roslin Institute in February 1997, using methods fromdiscourse analysis and cognitive semantics. It is hoped that a betterunderstanding of the emergence …
Herbert Spencer and the Professions
Herbert Spencer est le sociologue anglophone dont l'influence fut la plus grande au XIX e siecle. Aujourd'hui son oeuvre parait oubliee. Toutefois certains estiment que le modele organiciste inspire par la biologie devrait etre redecouvert dans les sciences sociales. Ainsi les analyses spencerienne des professions et de leur role dans les societes industrielles presenteraient un interet majeur. Elles sont comparees aux analyses «ecologiques» de l…
In the Beginning was the Work' Reflections on the Genesis of Occupations
One of the most curious omissions in the sociology of work and occupations is what would seem to be one of the most basic questions: When is an occupation an occupation? While there have been recent attempts to explore the issue by examining the history of census categories,1 these represent the end-point of the process at which new occupations receive official recognition and legitimation. My purpose in this paper is to discuss how occupations f…
Some Sociological Aspects of 'Nursing Research
Nursing in contemporary society
How to Observe Face-to-Face Communication
Ethnomethodology and Marxism
Accomplishing Profession
"Atrocity Stories" and Professional Relationships
It is argued that social interaction involves the reciprocal typification of parties to any encounter in the light of the social theories which those parties have available to them. One element of such theories is a conception of the social structure of one's society, including a taxonomy of occupations. Two problems are generated within this taxonomy, that of inclusion, defining what properly falls within some category, and that of exclusion, de…
Collectivism, Regionalism and Feminism
This paper takes up three particular themes in the historical development of the present pattern of social service provision in the United Kingdom and argues that existing accounts are somewhat misleading in their treatment of these issues. The three themes are the relationship between collectivism and individualism in social policy legislation and practice, the influence of centre and periphery in British political life and, to a lesser extent, …
Health and the Division of Labour
Aspects of Illness
Research note
Medical Anthropology in Britain
Ethics and Ethnography
Sociology in the Professions (Book)
Orchestrated Encounters
This paper reviews some of the contributions of conversational analysis and argues that its range of questions has been unduly restrictive. In particular, it is contended that its goals cannot be achieved without some reference to contextual features of a kind which have traditionally interested ethnographers, although it may offer a more rigorous methodology. These arguments are illustrated and developed through an analysis of speech-exchange in…
Symptoms and Illness
Becoming Psychiatrists (Book)
Child Care Law
The Sociology of the Professions
The Sociology of the Professions
In the Beginning was the Work' Reflections on the Genesis of Occupations
One of the most curious omissions in the sociology of work and occupations is what would seem to be one of the most basic questions: When is an occupation an occupation? While there have been recent attempts to explore the issue by examining the history of census categories,1 these represent the end-point of the process at which new occupations receive official recognition and legitimation. My purpose in this paper is to discuss how occupations f…
Categorization in accident departments
Children form a significant proportion of accident services' clientele but have received relatively little attention in the growing ethnographic literature on such organizations. This paper uses data from observation and interviews in four English accident departments to review Jeffery's influential analysis of medical staffs categorization of patients. After pointing to certain logical difficulties with this account, it is argued that an analysi…
Childhood as a Social Problem
The state's regulation of parents' care of their children is currently a subject of some controversy in England. Drafters and enforcers of statutes are caught between contradictory demands: for the extension of intervention in the interests of children mistreated by their parents and for the deregulation of family life in the interests of parental liberty. As we have argued elsewhere, this is, in certain respects, a false antithesis.' Nevertheles…
Protecting Our Children — What Confusion! Whose Concern
The Sociology of the Professions
Research issues in child abuse
Sociology (93 works) · Political science (55 works) · Law (42 works) · Social science (39 works) · Psychology (37 works) · Law (28 works) · Philosophy (28 works) · Epistemology (25 works) · Computer Science (24 works) · Medicine (23 works)