Jonathan Gabe
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 165937 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Jonathan Gabe |
| PRENOMES | Jonathan |
| SOBRENOME | Gabe |
| ASSINATURA | GABE J |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Royal Holloway University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3765-4935 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 79 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 749 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 77 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1982 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 16 |
Michael Bury (1945–2025)
Beyond the orthodox/CAM dichotomy
Elite athletes face extreme challenges to perform at peak levels. Acute and chronic musculoskeletal injuries are an occupational hazard while pressures to return to play post-injury are commonplace. Therapeutic options available to elite athletes range from novel 'cutting edge' biomedical therapies, established biomedical and surgical techniques, and physiotherapy, to a variety of non-orthodox therapies. Little is known about how different treatm…
Life Expectancy of White and Non-White Elite Heavyweight Boxers
Background In post-industrial countries, ethnic minorities suffer poorer health and premature deaths. The present study examined ethnic differences in life expectancy and related features among elite heavyweight boxers. Methods Dates of birth and death, anthropometry, and championship years were gathered from media archives for champions and challengers (never been a champion) between years 1889 and 2019. Cox regression adjusted for age at contes…
The reform of the English National Health Service
Managing Stigma
In this article, we explore the relationship between asthma and stigma, drawing on 31 interviews with young people (aged 5-17) in Ireland. Participants with mild to moderate asthma were recruited from Traveller and middle-class settled communities. Themes derived from an abductive approach to data analysis and a critical appreciation of Goffmanesque sociology include asthma as a discreditable stigma, negative social reactions (real, imagined, and…
Shedding new light on the (in)compatibility of chronic disease management with everyday life - social practice theory, mobile technologies and the interwoven time-spaces of teenage life
This article uses a socio-material approach, social practice theory, to provide new insights into the self-management of chronic illness. It demonstrates how this theory can bridge arguments about the respective roles of social and individual influences, and how it can foreground an oft-overlooked aspect of the issue - the demands of self-care technologies and consequences for participation in social life. Drawing on interviews and focus groups w…
Professional autonomy and surveillance
Professional autonomy has come under greater scrutiny due to managerialism, consumerism, information and communication technologies (ICT), and the changing composition of professions themselves. This scrutiny is often portrayed as a tension between professional and managerial logics. Recently, medical autonomy has increasingly been shaped in terms of transparency, where publication of clinical performance (via ICT) might be a more pervasive form …
Medicalisation, pharmaceuticalisation, or both? Exploring the medical management of sleeplessness as insomnia
In this paper we examine the medical management of sleeplessness as 'insomnia', through the eyes of general practitioners (GPs) and sleep experts in Britain. Three key themes were evident in the data. These related to (i) institutional issues around advocacy and training in sleep medicine (ii) conceptual issues in the diagnosis of insomnia (iii) and how these played out in terms of treatment issues. As a result, the bulk of medical management occ…
Healthcare in the news media
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…
Patients’ experiences of consultations with physician associates in primary care in England
BACKGROUND: Physician associates are new to English general practice and set to expand in numbers. OBJECTIVE: To investigate the patients' perspective on consulting with physician associates in general practice. DESIGN: A qualitative study, using semi-structured interviews, with thematic analysis. SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS: Thirty volunteer patients of 430 who had consulted physician associates for a same-day appointment and had returned a satisfa…
Public engagement and the role of the media in post-marketing drug safety
The potential for harms from adverse drug reactions (ADR) constitutes a critical patient safety and public health challenge, especially with increased medication usage as populations age. The research reported here explores explanations for a sudden increase in ADR reporting in New Zealand after a new formulation of a medication to treat hypothyroidism, Eltroxin® (levothyroxine), was phased in. The formulation was adjudged to be bioequivalent to …
The concept of medicalisation reassessed
Joan Busfield's (2017) reassessment of the concept of medicalisation is a welcome and timely contribution to a key issue within medical sociology, past and present. Not simply medical sociology however. Medicalisation indeed, as Conrad (2015) himself notes, now carries ‘analytical weight’ in a range of disciplines beyond sociology including history, anthropology, bioethics, economics, media studies and feminism. To this of course we may add engag…
Pharmaceuticalisation in the city
Cityscapes comprise intense repositories for socio-economic interactions, including those surrounding medicinal products. This raises issues of pharmaceuticalisation, involving the construction of a range of human conditions as targets for pharmaceutical interventions. Employing the metaphoric figure of the flâneur, we traverse the New Zealand cityscape, interrogating the mediation and emplacement of various medicinal products within thoroughfare…
Prescription hypnotics in the news
In 2012 the UK media reported the results of a paper in the British Medical Journal Open, including the finding that hypnotics increase the risk of 'premature death'. Taking this media coverage as a case study, the paper explores UK people's responses and assesses the implications for the debate about the (de)pharmaceuticalisation of sleep. Two hundred and fifty one posts to the websites of 6 UK newspapers were analysed thematically, along with 1…
Where biomedicalisation and magic meet
CAM within a field force of countervailing powers
Embodying health identities
Knowledge matters
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…
Prescriptions and proscriptions
The pharmaceuticalisation of sleep is a contentious issue. Sleep medicines get a 'bad press' due to their potential for dependence and other side effects, including studies reporting increased mortality risks for long-term users. Yet relatively little qualitative social science research has been conducted into how people understand and negotiate their use/non-use of sleep medicines in the context of their everyday lives. This paper draws on focus…
Violence in general practice
This article focuses on the extent to which violence against family doctors in England is experienced in gendered terms. It draws on data from two studies: a postal survey of 1,300 general practitioners (GPs) (62% response rate) and in-depth interviews with 26 doctors who have been assaulted or threatened; and 13 focus groups with primary care teams and 19 in-depth interviews with GPs who had expressed an interest in the topic of violence against…
Diet and identity
The ketogenic diet is a high-fat diet used to treat drug-resistant childhood epilepsy. Given that negative meanings tend to be attached to fatty foods and children's food consumption is seen to be the responsibility of parents, the ketogenic diet may be problematic for parenting identity. This article draws upon in-depth semi-structured interviews with 12 parents from 10 families that have a child whose epilepsy is being treated with the ketogeni…
Pharmaceuticals and society
From patient deference towards negotiated and precarious informality
This article contributes to sociological debates about trends in the power and status of medical professionals, focussing on claims that deferent patient relations are giving way to a more challenging consumerism. Analysing data from a mixed methods study involving general practitioners in England, we found some support for the idea that an apparent 'golden age' of patient deference is receding. Although not necessarily expressing nostalgia for s…
Moral discourses and pharmaceuticalised governance in households
Healthcare choice
Policy discourse shaped by neoliberal ideology, with its emphasis on marketisation and competition, has highlighted the importance of choice in the context of healthcare and health systems globally. Yet, evidence about how so-called consumers perceive and experience healthcare choice is in short supply and limited to specific healthcare systems, primarily in the Global North. This special issue aims to explore how choice is perceived and utilised…
The pharmaceuticalisation of society? A framework for analysis
Drawing on insights from both medical sociology and science and technology studies this article provides a critical analysis of the nature and status of pharmaceuticalisation in terms of the following key dimensions and dynamics: (i) the redefinition or reconfiguration of health 'problems' as having a pharmaceutical solution; (ii) changing forms of governance; (iii) mediation; (iv) the creation of new techno-social identities and the mobilisation…
The sociology of pharmaceuticals
This paper takes a critical look at progress and prospects regarding the sociology of pharmaceuticals over the years. Key themes examined include: (i) medicalisation and pharmaceuticalisation; (ii) regulation; (iii) consumption and consumerism; (iv) expectations and innovation. Papers in the monograph are also introduced and discussed in relation to these themes. The paper concludes with some further comments and reflections on progress and prosp…
Chronic illness as biographical contingency? Young people's experiences of asthma
Much research on chronic illness, which views the experience as disruptive, is adult-focused though there is an emerging literature on children's and young people's experiences. Drawing on 31 interviews conducted with young people diagnosed with asthma in south-west Ireland, this article contributes to this literature. The sample includes boys (n = 15) and girls (n = 16) aged between 5 and 17 from the Irish Traveller community and the larger sett…
Introduction
We are at the dawn of a genetic age.The Human Genome Project, the largest biological research enterprise in history, promises to have our entire genetic structure mapped by 2001.Our media report new scientific claims of genes associated with diseases, conditions, behaviours or personality traits so regularly that it seems that we are being provided with a gene-of-theweek.Scientists have identified or claimed genes for cystic fibrosis, Huntington …
Living with asthma
It takes three to tango
Evil necessity? The meaning of benzodiazepine use for women patients from one general practice
Prescriptions and proscriptions
The pharmaceuticalisation of sleep is a contentious issue. Sleep medicines get a 'bad press' due to their potential for dependence and other side effects, including studies reporting increased mortality risks for long-term users. Yet relatively little qualitative social science research has been conducted into how people understand and negotiate their use/non-use of sleep medicines in the context of their everyday lives. This paper draws on focus…
Medicalisation or customisation? Sleep, enterprise and enhancement in the 24/7 society
Moral discourses and pharmaceuticalised governance in households
Home as a hybrid centre of medication practice
This article presents research that explores how medications are understood and used by people in everyday life. An intensive process of data collection from 55 households was used in this research, which included photo-elicitation and diary-elicitation interviews. It is argued that households are at the very centre of complex networks of therapeutic advice and practice and can usefully be seen as hybrid centres of medication practice, where a pl…
Life on a slippery slope
This paper focuses on how adults with cystic fibrosis (CF) attending a specialist CF centre in the UK perceive their health. In common with many other genetic diseases, CF is traditionally conceptualised as a fatal childhood disease, yet the average survival age for those with CF has been steadily rising over the past half century. Thus it is now predicted that those born in 1990 will live on average for 40 years. To date, however, most sociologi…
Introduction
Although scholars in sociology of health and illness and criminology have long been interested in questions of authority, expertise, social control, legitimacy and credibility, the two fields have developed largely independently of one another. Sociologists studying health and illness have sustained an interest in issues of social control ever since Talcott Parsons conceptualised physicians as moral gatekeepers, helping to maintain the integrativ…
The limits of medicine
The sociology of cognitive enhancement
To date, sociology of health and medicine has engaged in only a limited way in debates about cognitive enhancement drugs and how they might affect or change the way we live our lives. In this review we explore the implications of the development of such drugs, both now and in the future, with particular reference to the changing drivers and dynamics of medicalisation or biomedicalisation over time. Whilst both concepts shed important light on the…
Emplacement and everyday use of medications in domestic dwellings
Violence against doctors
Violence against doctors provides an illuminating context for studying medicalisation and its limits in the management of deviance. The paper examines the emergence of such violence as a policy issue in England, with particular reference to general practitioners (GPs) in the National Health Service. Recent guidance exhorts doctors to exercise 'zero tolerance' with respect to acts of violence. The emphasis is on risk management and protecting vict…
Knowledge matters
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…
Halcion Nights
This paper offers an analysis of the events surrounding the suspension of the licence for the widely used sleeping tablet Halcion (triazolam) by the British Licensing Authority in October 1991. It is argued that these events highlight a growing crisis in modern medical treatments and in the social relations of health care. This is illustrated by focusing on four elements which have contributed to Halcion becoming a public issue and to its suspens…
Tranquillisers as Social Control
In this paper we use findings from an empirical study of the meaning of tranquilliser prescribing and use to examine the contention that these drugs are a means of social control, and to assess the explanatory value of the concept of social control when applied to the doctor-patient relationship. We first outline the historical application of the concept to the health field, specify the cultural mechanisms by which social control is said to be ac…
The debate about the funding of Herceptin
Tranquillisers as a Social Problem
This paper attempts to highlight the value of the 'social problem' perspective for the sociology of health and illness by applying it to the issue of tranquilliser use and dependence. The approach involves focusing on the emergence of benzodiazepine tranquilliser dependence as a social problem and the extent to which it has been legitimated by the media and by the state. In the conclusion we draw out the implications of our case study for the dev…
From patient deference towards negotiated and precarious informality
This article contributes to sociological debates about trends in the power and status of medical professionals, focussing on claims that deferent patient relations are giving way to a more challenging consumerism. Analysing data from a mixed methods study involving general practitioners in England, we found some support for the idea that an apparent 'golden age' of patient deference is receding. Although not necessarily expressing nostalgia for s…
Mediating illness
The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the value of insights from media studies for medical sociology by focusing on the cultural and ideological messages transmitted in newspaper coverage of tranquilliser dependence. An analysis of 62 stories recounting the experiences of individual tranquilliser users reveals that journalists concentrate on two kinds of person – the celebrity and the ordinary user‐ in their reports. The ways in which the pr…
Embodying health identities
Evil necessity? The meaning of benzodiazepine use for women patients from one general practice
Tranquillisers as Social Control
In this paper we use findings from an empirical study of the meaning of tranquilliser prescribing and use to examine the contention that these drugs are a means of social control, and to assess the explanatory value of the concept of social control when applied to the doctor-patient relationship. We first outline the historical application of the concept to the health field, specify the cultural mechanisms by which social control is said to be ac…
Rural tranquillity
Prescribed Drug Use and the Management of Everyday Life
Social scientific studies of prescribed drug use have played an important part in heightening awareness that their use can best be understood when considered within a social context. From a sociological point of view, however, these studies often suffer from limitations which restrict their descriptive and explanatory power. This paper discusses these limitations before attempting to develop an alternative approach which focuses on the meanings a…
Is space bad for your health? The relationship between crowding in the home and emotional distress in women
Literature concerning the relationship between crowding (inside and outside the home) and health is reviewed. Attention is then focused on the association between internal density and psychological health in women. This relationship is investigated using data from a community survey conducted in West London in 1977. Our findings indicate a J-shaped relationship between internal density and psychological symptoms: that is, low as well as high leve…
Tranquillisers
Research note
Tranquillisers as a Social Problem
This paper attempts to highlight the value of the 'social problem' perspective for the sociology of health and illness by applying it to the issue of tranquilliser use and dependence. The approach involves focusing on the emergence of benzodiazepine tranquilliser dependence as a social problem and the extent to which it has been legitimated by the media and by the state. In the conclusion we draw out the implications of our case study for the dev…
The limits of medicine
Explaining ‘Race ‘‐education
This article focuses on three models—Marxist, representational and interpretive—which have been used to explain the development of ‘race'‐education in Britain over the last 25 years. Each model is discussed initially in terms of its core assumptions and links with mainstream sociological and/or political theory, in order to clarify its intellectual origins and conceptual basis. The analytical questions which stem from these models’ assumptions ar…
Mediating illness
The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the value of insights from media studies for medical sociology by focusing on the cultural and ideological messages transmitted in newspaper coverage of tranquilliser dependence. An analysis of 62 stories recounting the experiences of individual tranquilliser users reveals that journalists concentrate on two kinds of person – the celebrity and the ordinary user‐ in their reports. The ways in which the pr…
Tranquillisers and health care in crisis
Race'-Education Policy as Social Control
This paper focuses on the instrumentalist Marxist model which has been used to explain the policies of the British state in the field of 'race'-education. After discussing the model's core assumptions and its application in this field the paper explores the model's explanatory adequacy through a case study of the role of the quasi-state agencies of the 'race'-relations industry in developing 'race'-education policy in initial teacher education. I…
Sexy docs’ and ‘busty blondes’
This paper presents an analysis of press coverage of the General Medical Council Professional Conduct Committee (PCC) during 1990 and 1991. All tabloid press coverage during this period was compared with PCC minutes to establish what kinds of cases were reported. The analysis reveals that the press gave undue attention to hearings involving sexual misconduct by General Practitioners and that the majority of patients reported as suffering from suc…
Halcion Nights
This paper offers an analysis of the events surrounding the suspension of the licence for the widely used sleeping tablet Halcion (triazolam) by the British Licensing Authority in October 1991. It is argued that these events highlight a growing crisis in modern medical treatments and in the social relations of health care. This is illustrated by focusing on four elements which have contributed to Halcion becoming a public issue and to its suspens…
Rituals of Silence
Introduction
We are at the dawn of a genetic age.The Human Genome Project, the largest biological research enterprise in history, promises to have our entire genetic structure mapped by 2001.Our media report new scientific claims of genes associated with diseases, conditions, behaviours or personality traits so regularly that it seems that we are being provided with a gene-of-theweek.Scientists have identified or claimed genes for cystic fibrosis, Huntington …
Researching Professional Discourses on Violence
This paper discusses the value of a multi‐method approach for studying violence against professionals. It is based on a project currently conducted by the authors on the extent and impact of violence against three professions working in the community (General Practitioners, Probation Officers and Anglican Clergy). The paper starts by making some general points about the nature of our chosen occupations' professional discourses on violence and the…
Living with asthma
Violence against doctors
Violence against doctors provides an illuminating context for studying medicalisation and its limits in the management of deviance. The paper examines the emergence of such violence as a policy issue in England, with particular reference to general practitioners (GPs) in the National Health Service. Recent guidance exhorts doctors to exercise 'zero tolerance' with respect to acts of violence. The emphasis is on risk management and protecting vict…
Introduction
Although scholars in sociology of health and illness and criminology have long been interested in questions of authority, expertise, social control, legitimacy and credibility, the two fields have developed largely independently of one another. Sociologists studying health and illness have sustained an interest in issues of social control ever since Talcott Parsons conceptualised physicians as moral gatekeepers, helping to maintain the integrativ…
Life on a slippery slope
This paper focuses on how adults with cystic fibrosis (CF) attending a specialist CF centre in the UK perceive their health. In common with many other genetic diseases, CF is traditionally conceptualised as a fatal childhood disease, yet the average survival age for those with CF has been steadily rising over the past half century. Thus it is now predicted that those born in 1990 will live on average for 40 years. To date, however, most sociologi…
Risk and liminality in mental health social work
From a socio-cultural standpoint, the concept of otherness is central to explaining the way risk is associated with certain social groups rather than others. In the mental health field, writers have frequently employed the concept of otherness to describe the ways in which mental health service users have been perceived, especially since the implementation of community care policies in the UK in the 1990s. Despite its popularity, few empirical st…
It takes three to tango
Reducing Violence Against NHS Staff
Sociology (60 obras) · Political science (49 obras) · Psychology (47 obras) · Medicine (41 obras) · Law (34 obras) · Law (23 obras) · Public relations (21 obras) · Psychiatry (19 obras) · Social Psychology (18 obras) · Epistemology (17 obras)