Fran M Collyer
Biographic Data
| ID | 2651747 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Fran M Collyer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Fran M |
| FAMILY NAME | Collyer |
| SIGNATURE | COLLYER F M |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Sydney |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9877-6645 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 285 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
An interview with Fran Collyer
Professor Fran Collyer is a revered sociologist currently leading an epic Australian Research Council-funded project about the history of sociology in Australia. The project includes interviews with almost 200 Australian sociologists. For this special section celebrating Journal of Sociology ’s 60th Anniversary, the journal’s co-editor-in-chief, Ashley Barnwell, turned the microphone on Fran Collyer to learn more about the history of our discipli…
Luc Boltanski, Pierre Bourdieu, class, capital and the body
ThanksForTyping … and the fieldwork: The role of sociologists’ wives in classic British studies
This article explores the role of social researchers’ wives in post-war British studies, in particular drawing on the diaries kept by the wives of two noted sociologists while their husbands, Peter Willmott and Dennis Marsden, were respectively undertaking studies in the working class communities of Bethnal Green and Salford. The wives – Phyllis Willmott and Pat Marsden, made contributions to the community studies in the mid 1950s/early 1960s, at…
Chinese Medicine as Boundary Object(s): Examining TCM’s Integration into International Science Through the Case of Australian--Chinese Research Collaboration
Despite being defined in the West as alternative medicine and often seen as incommensurable with biomedicine and bioscience, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has, paradoxically, assimilated into dominant spaces of knowledge production and legitimation, such as the International Classification of Diseases. In Australia, TCM comprises a designated area of cooperation with China, and TCM research is carried out in numerous universities by otherwis…
Promising the earth: Forms of capital promised and pursued in Australian-Chinese research collaborations
Science is a space of both collaboration and competition, illustrated by international research collaboration (IRC) and its advantages for individual countries, institutions and scientists. IRC also brings together countries positioned unequally in global epistemic hierarchies. Little is known about how scientists navigate these tensions within IRC. We explore this through a study of Australian–Chinese IRC, drawing on interviews with Australian s…
The state of the discipline: Australian sociology and its future
Debates about the state of Australian sociology have raged for as long as sociology has existed in Australia. Concerns about the discipline's future may be inevitable for a critical, reflexive discipline, but to those entering the discipline, it is neither instructive nor productive to be subjected to lingering disciplinary anxieties. After more than fifty years, it is time to take stock of the differing visions of sociology, and examine the argu…
Historiography and National Histories of Sociology: Methods and Methodologies
Rethinking the Epistemic Compass
A very recent development in the social sciences has been the intensification of claims about the exclusion of scholarship emerging from scholars of the global South. Drawing from diverse disciplines (literary studies, the social sciences and the humanities) and diverse origins (post-colonial theory, post-orientalism, subaltern studies and post-structuralism), this social and intellectual movement has now begun to seriously challenge the discipli…
Repenser la boussole épistémique
Très récemment, les sciences sociales ont connu des revendications relatives à l’exclusion de la recherche en provenance des chercheurs et chercheuses du Sud global. S’appuyant sur diverses disciplines (études littéraires, sciences sociales et humaines) et divers mouvements de pensée (théorie postcoloniale, post-orientalisme, études subalternes et post-structuralisme), ce mouvement social et intellectuel a commencé à remettre sérieusement en ques…
Writing national histories of sociology: Methods, approaches and visions
There has been a renewal of interest in the writing of national histories of sociology, with dozens of histories recently published in both the global North and South. Despite this, there has been a dearth of discussion about the methods and methodologies appropriate to such a task. Indeed, few histories of sociology, and fewer still national histories of sociology, explicitly address methodology. In this study, we review the literature on histor…
Historiography and National Histories of Sociology: Methods and Methodologies
Australia and the Global South: Knowledge and the Ambiguities of Place and Identity
Australia was settled as a colony of Britain from the 17th century, and its early history of violent occupation has gradually given way to a relatively peaceful, wealthy, multicultural society. As a post-colonial country, its people share characteristics with those of Britain, but, as a multicultural society, national identity is increasingly influenced by the cultures of many countries, from both the global North and South. In this paper, the qu…
Sociologies of New Zealand
Book review of: Crothers, Charles. 2018. Sociologies of New Zealand. Sociology Transformed Series. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. 151 pp.ISBN 978-3-319-73866-6. Price: €53,49
Comparative optimism about infection and recovery from Covid‐19; Implications for adherence with lockdown advice
BACKGROUND: Comparative optimism, the belief that negative events are more likely to happen to others rather than to oneself, is well established in health risk research. It is unknown, however, whether comparative optimism also permeates people's health expectations and potentially behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic. OBJECTIVES: Data were collected through an international survey (N = 6485) exploring people's thoughts and psychosocial behavi…
Navigating and making choices about healthcare: The role of place
Re-making the global economy of knowledge: Do new fields of research change the structure of North-South relations
How is global-North predominance in the making of organized knowledge affected by the rise of new domains of research? This question is examined empirically in three interdisciplinary areas - climate change, HIV-AIDS, and gender studies - through interviews with 70 researchers in Southern-tier countries Brazil, South Africa and Australia. The study found that the centrality of the North was reinstituted as these domains came into existence, throu…
Negotiating with the North: How Southern-tier intellectual workers deal with the global economy of knowledge
This article examines a group of intellectual workers who occupy a peripheral but not powerless position in the global economy of knowledge. How do they handle relations with the global metropole, especially in new fields of research where established hierarchies are in question? Three new domains of knowledge - climate change, HIV/AIDS and gender studies - are studied through interviews with 70 active researchers in Southern-tier countries Brazi…
Healthcare in the news media: The privileging of private over public
This article reports on a discourse analysis of the representation of healthcare in the print news media, and the way this representation shapes perspectives of healthcare. We analysed news items from six major Australian newspapers over a three-year time period. We show how various framing devices promote ideas about a crisis in the current public healthcare system, the existence of a precarious balance between the public and private health sect…
Global patterns in the publishing of academic knowledge: Global North, global South
Much is made of the persistent structures of inequality that determine the production and distribution of goods and services across the world, but less is known about the inequalities of global academic knowledge production, and even a smaller amount about the nature of the publication industry upon which this production process depends. Reflecting on an international study of academic publishing that has been framed within the lens of Southern t…
Envisaging the healthcare sector as a field: Moving from Talcott Parsons to Pierre Bourdieu
Gatekeepers in the healthcare sector: Knowledge and Bourdieu's concept of field
Toward a global sociology of knowledge: Post-colonial realities and intellectual practices
This article discusses changing social perspectives on knowledge, from the old sociology of knowledge to current post-colonial debates. The authors propose an approach that sees knowledge not as an abstract social construction but as the product of specific forms of social labour, showing the ontoformativity of social practice that creates reality through historical time. Research in three southern-tier countries examines knowledge workers and th…
Knowledge matters: Producing and Using Knowledge to Navigate Healthcare Systems
In many contemporary healthcare systems, individuals are expected to be rational actors – weighing up available knowledge and making choices about their healthcare needs. In the policy context, this has been most explicitly applied to the financing of healthcare where there is encouragement for the purchase of private health insurance. However, perceptions of public and private healthcare provision, knowledge about healthcare needs, and the types…
The Palgrave Handbook of Social Theory in Health, Illness and Medicine
This wide-reaching handbook offers a new perspective on the sociology of health, illness and medicine by stressing the importance of social theory. Examining a range of classic and contemporary female
The Sociology of Health, Illness and Medicine: Institutional Progress and Theoretical Frameworks
As we write in the twenty-first century, the sociology of health and medicine sits as a distinct and growing speciality field of research and university teaching, found on all continents and within many countries, including the United States, eastern and western Europe, Australia, Britain, Japan, China, Brazil, South Africa and Mexico
Global patterns in the publishing of academic knowledge: Global North, global South
Much is made of the persistent structures of inequality that determine the production and distribution of goods and services across the world, but less is known about the inequalities of global academic knowledge production, and even a smaller amount about the nature of the publication industry upon which this production process depends. Reflecting on an international study of academic publishing that has been framed within the lens of Southern t…
Healthcare choice: Bourdieu's capital, habitus and field
The promotion of choice is a common theme in both policy discourses and commercial marketing claims about healthcare. However, within the multiple potential pathways of the healthcare 'maze', how do healthcare 'consumers' or patients understand and experience choice? What is meant by 'choice' in the policy context, and, importantly from a sociological perspective, how are such choices socially produced and structured? In this theoretical article,…
Toward a global sociology of knowledge: Post-colonial realities and intellectual practices
This article discusses changing social perspectives on knowledge, from the old sociology of knowledge to current post-colonial debates. The authors propose an approach that sees knowledge not as an abstract social construction but as the product of specific forms of social labour, showing the ontoformativity of social practice that creates reality through historical time. Research in three southern-tier countries examines knowledge workers and th…
Gatekeepers in the healthcare sector: Knowledge and Bourdieu's concept of field
Re-making the global economy of knowledge: Do new fields of research change the structure of North-South relations
How is global-North predominance in the making of organized knowledge affected by the rise of new domains of research? This question is examined empirically in three interdisciplinary areas - climate change, HIV-AIDS, and gender studies - through interviews with 70 researchers in Southern-tier countries Brazil, South Africa and Australia. The study found that the centrality of the North was reinstituted as these domains came into existence, throu…
Negotiating with the North: How Southern-tier intellectual workers deal with the global economy of knowledge
This article examines a group of intellectual workers who occupy a peripheral but not powerless position in the global economy of knowledge. How do they handle relations with the global metropole, especially in new fields of research where established hierarchies are in question? Three new domains of knowledge - climate change, HIV/AIDS and gender studies - are studied through interviews with 70 active researchers in Southern-tier countries Brazi…
Knowledge matters: Producing and Using Knowledge to Navigate Healthcare Systems
In many contemporary healthcare systems, individuals are expected to be rational actors – weighing up available knowledge and making choices about their healthcare needs. In the policy context, this has been most explicitly applied to the financing of healthcare where there is encouragement for the purchase of private health insurance. However, perceptions of public and private healthcare provision, knowledge about healthcare needs, and the types…
Practices of conformity and resistance in the marketisation of the academy: Bourdieu, professionalism and academic capitalism
The paper reports on an empirical study based on qualitative interviews with staff from four Australian universities. These universities are shown to be undergoing significant social change as processes of marketisation impact on the everyday practices of academic workers. The universities are analysed as sites of contestation between the new professional managers and the established academic profession over the control of the conditions of work,…
Constructing health consumers: Private health insurance discourses in Australia and the United Kingdom
Significant transformations of the health care services sector over the past three decades have seen an increasing reliance on the private provision of health care services mediated through private health insurance. In countries such as Australia and the UK, private health insurance is promoted as providing a greater choice for individuals and easing the burden on the public system. While these claims, the policy contexts and the decision-making …
Envisaging the healthcare sector as a field: Moving from Talcott Parsons to Pierre Bourdieu
Origins and canons: Medicine and the history of sociology
Differing accounts are conventionally given of the origins of medical sociology and its parent discipline sociology. These distinct "histories" are justified on the basis that the sociological founders were uninterested in medicine, mortality and disease. This article challenges these "constructions" of the past, proposing the theorization of health not as a "late development of sociology" but an integral part of its formation. Drawing on a selec…
Australia and the Global South: Knowledge and the Ambiguities of Place and Identity
Australia was settled as a colony of Britain from the 17th century, and its early history of violent occupation has gradually given way to a relatively peaceful, wealthy, multicultural society. As a post-colonial country, its people share characteristics with those of Britain, but, as a multicultural society, national identity is increasingly influenced by the cultures of many countries, from both the global North and South. In this paper, the qu…
The production of scholarly knowledge in the global market arena: University ranking systems, prestige and power
The relationships between disciplines and the institutions within which they are situated is a fertile area for researching the shaping of sociological knowledge. Applying theoretical insights from the sociology of knowledge, this article draws on an empirical study of research publications in the sociology of health and medicine to show which institutions in the Australian context are most likely to use sociological theory. When the institutions…
Sociology, sociologists and core-periphery reflections
This article reports on a citation-context analysis of journal articles from Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. Examining publications from the sociology of health and medicine, the study draws a number of conclusions about the state of sociology, inter-country relationships between knowledge workers, and national systems of sociological knowledge production. It finds that core-periphery relations define significant f…
Navigating and making choices about healthcare: The role of place
Sociologists and their work: Inter-country comparisons in the sociology of health and medicine
Fifty eyes of fifty patients with ocular hypertension had their visual fields tested on a Friedmann Mark 1 field analyser whilst wearing a Wratten 47B blue filter in a spectacle frame. All had normal visual fields to a white stimulus. Use of a scoring system with the blue field identified 11 patients (22%) with ocular hypertension as abnormal. The scores from this subgroup were indistinguishable from a group of subjects with early glaucomatous fi…
The birth of a speciality: The sociology of health and medicine in Australia
This paper offers a study of the specialist field of the sociology of health and medicine, and examines its institutional development in Australia. A thesis is developed about the relationship between the field and the parent discipline of sociology. The formation of the discipline and the specialist field are proposed to have occurred in stages: the formative years, a period of inter-disciplinarity and collaboration, a stage of intensification a…
The state of the discipline: Australian sociology and its future
Debates about the state of Australian sociology have raged for as long as sociology has existed in Australia. Concerns about the discipline's future may be inevitable for a critical, reflexive discipline, but to those entering the discipline, it is neither instructive nor productive to be subjected to lingering disciplinary anxieties. After more than fifty years, it is time to take stock of the differing visions of sociology, and examine the argu…
Healthcare in the news media: The privileging of private over public
This article reports on a discourse analysis of the representation of healthcare in the print news media, and the way this representation shapes perspectives of healthcare. We analysed news items from six major Australian newspapers over a three-year time period. We show how various framing devices promote ideas about a crisis in the current public healthcare system, the existence of a precarious balance between the public and private health sect…
Schools of sociology? The structuring of sociological knowledge in the sociology of health and medicine since 1960
The production of sociological knowledge in Australian universities is explored through an empirical study of research papers published in a selection of academic outlets between 1960 and 2011. Drawing on theories concerning scholarly practices, institutional formation and the sociology of knowledge, questions are posed about the factors that shape and structure the production of sociological knowledge about health and medicine. The concept of in…
The privatisation of Medicare and the National Health Service, and the global marketisation of healthcare systems
Over recent decades, the healthcare sectors of many countries, both developed and developing, have been fundamentally restructured by two events: the re-direction of government policy toward the privatisation of publicly-funded institutions, and a new interest in strategic investment from the corporate sector in health services and products. Some might regard this radical change as bringing forth the possibility of greater effi ciency and increas…
A sociological approach to workforce shortages: Findings of a qualitative study in Australian hospitals
Many countries, including Australia, are currently experiencing severe shortages of professional, para-professional, and semi-professional workers in their health care systems. This is generally conceived as a problem stemming from rising demand in health care services or the production of inadequate numbers of healthrelated graduates. A qualitative study of health care workers in the Australian context challenges the adequacy of this supply-dema…
Writing national histories of sociology: Methods, approaches and visions
There has been a renewal of interest in the writing of national histories of sociology, with dozens of histories recently published in both the global North and South. Despite this, there has been a dearth of discussion about the methods and methodologies appropriate to such a task. Indeed, few histories of sociology, and fewer still national histories of sociology, explicitly address methodology. In this study, we review the literature on histor…
Technological invention: Post-modernism and social structure
The Social Construction of Illness: Illness and Medical Knowledge in Past and Present (Book)
Technological invention: Post-modernism and social structure
A sociological approach to workforce shortages: Findings of a qualitative study in Australian hospitals
Many countries, including Australia, are currently experiencing severe shortages of professional, para-professional, and semi-professional workers in their health care systems. This is generally conceived as a problem stemming from rising demand in health care services or the production of inadequate numbers of healthrelated graduates. A qualitative study of health care workers in the Australian context challenges the adequacy of this supply-dema…
Origins and canons: Medicine and the history of sociology
Differing accounts are conventionally given of the origins of medical sociology and its parent discipline sociology. These distinct "histories" are justified on the basis that the sociological founders were uninterested in medicine, mortality and disease. This article challenges these "constructions" of the past, proposing the theorization of health not as a "late development of sociology" but an integral part of its formation. Drawing on a selec…
Sociología de la medicina y de la salud en Australia
This paper offers an analysis of the development and institutionalisation of the sociology of health and medicine in Australia. As a former British colony, sociology was primarily brought into the country with its British and European migrants, and developed in a series of six discrete stages: the formative years of the Colonial period and early decades after Federation; the period of inter-disciplinarity and collaboration in the 1950s and early …
The privatisation of Medicare and the National Health Service, and the global marketisation of healthcare systems
Over recent decades, the healthcare sectors of many countries, both developed and developing, have been fundamentally restructured by two events: the re-direction of government policy toward the privatisation of publicly-funded institutions, and a new interest in strategic investment from the corporate sector in health services and products. Some might regard this radical change as bringing forth the possibility of greater effi ciency and increas…
Constructing health consumers: Private health insurance discourses in Australia and the United Kingdom
Significant transformations of the health care services sector over the past three decades have seen an increasing reliance on the private provision of health care services mediated through private health insurance. In countries such as Australia and the UK, private health insurance is promoted as providing a greater choice for individuals and easing the burden on the public system. While these claims, the policy contexts and the decision-making …
Mapping the Sociology of Health and Medicine
This book studies the sociology of health and medicine across three different countries, the USA, UK and Australia, examining the nature of disciplines and their specialties and posing sociological qu
The birth of a speciality: The sociology of health and medicine in Australia
This paper offers a study of the specialist field of the sociology of health and medicine, and examines its institutional development in Australia. A thesis is developed about the relationship between the field and the parent discipline of sociology. The formation of the discipline and the specialist field are proposed to have occurred in stages: the formative years, a period of inter-disciplinarity and collaboration, a stage of intensification a…
The production of scholarly knowledge in the global market arena: University ranking systems, prestige and power
The relationships between disciplines and the institutions within which they are situated is a fertile area for researching the shaping of sociological knowledge. Applying theoretical insights from the sociology of knowledge, this article draws on an empirical study of research publications in the sociology of health and medicine to show which institutions in the Australian context are most likely to use sociological theory. When the institutions…
Sociologists and their work: Inter-country comparisons in the sociology of health and medicine
Fifty eyes of fifty patients with ocular hypertension had their visual fields tested on a Friedmann Mark 1 field analyser whilst wearing a Wratten 47B blue filter in a spectacle frame. All had normal visual fields to a white stimulus. Use of a scoring system with the blue field identified 11 patients (22%) with ocular hypertension as abnormal. The scores from this subgroup were indistinguishable from a group of subjects with early glaucomatous fi…
Schools of sociology? The structuring of sociological knowledge in the sociology of health and medicine since 1960
The production of sociological knowledge in Australian universities is explored through an empirical study of research papers published in a selection of academic outlets between 1960 and 2011. Drawing on theories concerning scholarly practices, institutional formation and the sociology of knowledge, questions are posed about the factors that shape and structure the production of sociological knowledge about health and medicine. The concept of in…
Practices of conformity and resistance in the marketisation of the academy: Bourdieu, professionalism and academic capitalism
The paper reports on an empirical study based on qualitative interviews with staff from four Australian universities. These universities are shown to be undergoing significant social change as processes of marketisation impact on the everyday practices of academic workers. The universities are analysed as sites of contestation between the new professional managers and the established academic profession over the control of the conditions of work,…
Reflexivity and the Sociology of Science and Technology: The Invention of "Eryc" the Antibiotic
Until recently, the social-technical process of invention has fallen between sociological investigation of the genesis of a new idea (an ideational phenomenon) and the production of a new technology (a material phenomenon). The advent of post-modernism and post-structuralism offered new avenues for theorising invention, accounting for, on the one hand, its material nature, and, on the other, its ideational nature, through the notion of socio-tech…
Sociology, sociologists and core-periphery reflections
This article reports on a citation-context analysis of journal articles from Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. Examining publications from the sociology of health and medicine, the study draws a number of conclusions about the state of sociology, inter-country relationships between knowledge workers, and national systems of sociological knowledge production. It finds that core-periphery relations define significant f…
The Palgrave Handbook of Social Theory in Health, Illness and Medicine
This wide-reaching handbook offers a new perspective on the sociology of health, illness and medicine by stressing the importance of social theory. Examining a range of classic and contemporary female
The Sociology of Health, Illness and Medicine: Institutional Progress and Theoretical Frameworks
As we write in the twenty-first century, the sociology of health and medicine sits as a distinct and growing speciality field of research and university teaching, found on all continents and within many countries, including the United States, eastern and western Europe, Australia, Britain, Japan, China, Brazil, South Africa and Mexico
Healthcare choice: Bourdieu's capital, habitus and field
The promotion of choice is a common theme in both policy discourses and commercial marketing claims about healthcare. However, within the multiple potential pathways of the healthcare 'maze', how do healthcare 'consumers' or patients understand and experience choice? What is meant by 'choice' in the policy context, and, importantly from a sociological perspective, how are such choices socially produced and structured? In this theoretical article,…
Knowledge matters: Producing and Using Knowledge to Navigate Healthcare Systems
In many contemporary healthcare systems, individuals are expected to be rational actors – weighing up available knowledge and making choices about their healthcare needs. In the policy context, this has been most explicitly applied to the financing of healthcare where there is encouragement for the purchase of private health insurance. However, perceptions of public and private healthcare provision, knowledge about healthcare needs, and the types…
Envisaging the healthcare sector as a field: Moving from Talcott Parsons to Pierre Bourdieu
Gatekeepers in the healthcare sector: Knowledge and Bourdieu's concept of field
Toward a global sociology of knowledge: Post-colonial realities and intellectual practices
This article discusses changing social perspectives on knowledge, from the old sociology of knowledge to current post-colonial debates. The authors propose an approach that sees knowledge not as an abstract social construction but as the product of specific forms of social labour, showing the ontoformativity of social practice that creates reality through historical time. Research in three southern-tier countries examines knowledge workers and th…
Navigating and making choices about healthcare: The role of place
Re-making the global economy of knowledge: Do new fields of research change the structure of North-South relations
How is global-North predominance in the making of organized knowledge affected by the rise of new domains of research? This question is examined empirically in three interdisciplinary areas - climate change, HIV-AIDS, and gender studies - through interviews with 70 researchers in Southern-tier countries Brazil, South Africa and Australia. The study found that the centrality of the North was reinstituted as these domains came into existence, throu…
Negotiating with the North: How Southern-tier intellectual workers deal with the global economy of knowledge
This article examines a group of intellectual workers who occupy a peripheral but not powerless position in the global economy of knowledge. How do they handle relations with the global metropole, especially in new fields of research where established hierarchies are in question? Three new domains of knowledge - climate change, HIV/AIDS and gender studies - are studied through interviews with 70 active researchers in Southern-tier countries Brazi…
Sociology (35 works) · Political science (29 works) · Social science (25 works) · Law (22 works) · Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice (16 works) · Epistemology (14 works) · Social and Cultural Dynamics (14 works) · Economics (13 works) · Health care (13 works) · Computer Science (10 works)