Alan Cribb
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 293187 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Alan Cribb |
| PRENOMES | Alan |
| SOBRENOME | Cribb |
| ASSINATURA | CRIBB A |
| AFILIAÇÕES | King's College London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7908-5195 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 47 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 269 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 47 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1988 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 10 |
Navigating uncertain times
This paper explores a relatively neglected dimension of the changing culture of academic work: the implications of changing models of academic professionalism, and specifically the rise of ‘organisational professionalism’, for academic mentoring. In the paper, ‘organisational professionalism’ is used to signal a cluster of trends, including productivist currents and more progressive changes reflecting inclusion and identity concerns. After summar…
Varieties of improvement expertise
The 'improvement' of health care is now established and growing as a field of research and practice. This article, based on qualitative data from interviews with 21 senior leaders in this field, analyses the growth of improvement expertise as not simply an expansion but also a multiplication of 'ways of knowing'. It illustrates how health-care improvement is an area where contests about relevant kinds of knowledge, approaches and purposes prolife…
Attending to the Ethical Orientation of Health and Care Regulators
This paper offers an empirically informed ethical analysis of the recent history of health and social care regulation in the UK focused especially on the contributions made by the Professional Standards Authority for Health and Social Care. The paper is largely organised around two broad questions: First, in what respects can regulation support, mobilise and model professionalism and professional identity? Second, nested within this, given that r…
Aesthetics for everyday quality
In this paper we seek to illuminate the importance of aesthetics for healthcare quality and encourage more explicit discussion of aesthetics in healthcare improvement scholarship and practice. We hope to contribute to and help develop the hinterland between arts-based initiatives in healthcare and the 'normal business' of healthcare quality improvement. Our broad contention is: (1) That aesthetic considerations should be seen as of universal rele…
Talking it better
In this paper, we consider the role of conversations in contributing to healthcare quality improvement. More specifically, we suggest that conversations can be important in responding to what we call 'normative complexity'. As well as reflecting on the value of conversations, the aim is to introduce the dimension of normative complexity as something that requires theoretical and practical attention alongside the more recognised challenges of comp…
What works? Academic integrity and the research-policy relationship
In this paper, we consider the intensifying pressures on critical research and academic integrity in a research policy context that has come to be increasingly dominated by an instrumentalist mind-set. Using sensitising resources drawn from Geoff Whitty’s critique of the ‘what works’ agenda, we reflect on the current conditions of academic labour and some of the key issues and dilemmas they pose for critical researchers in the sociology of educat…
Managing ethical uncertainty
This article illustrates and discusses the idea of 'implicit normativity', and specifically its relevance to the management of ethical uncertainty. In particular I consider (i) the role implicit normativity plays in masking and containing potential ethical uncertainty and (ii) the contrast and boundary between implicit normativity and 'overt ethics' where ethical contestation - as well as particular processes and agents - are highlighted as salie…
‘My Fitbit Thinks I Can Do Better!’ Do Health Promoting Wearable Technologies Support Personal Autonomy
This paper critically examines the extent to which health promoting wearable technologies can provide people with greater autonomy over their health. These devices are frequently presented as a means of expanding the possibilities people have for making healthier decisions and living healthier lives. We accept that by collecting, monitoring, analysing and displaying biomedical data, and by helping to underpin motivation, wearable technologies can…
“Putting people in charge of their own health and care?” Using meta‐narrative review and the example of online sexual health services to re‐think relationships between e‐health and agency
Shaping Ethical and Civic Identities
This paper uses the lens of “service learning” to explore some of the practical and ethical challenges of envisaging and providing preparation for social and vocational life. The first half considers some influential but narrow constructions of service learning, showing how these sit within and reproduce broader instrumentalist and transactional currents that are, at best, ethically impoverished but also seemingly corrosive of the ends they are s…
Professional identity and epistemic stress
Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) degrees in Australian and British universities have come under attack from sceptics who argue that such courses teach only ‘pseudoscience’. Moreover, CAM academics have themselves been publicly labelled ‘quacks’. Comparatively little is known about this group of health professionals who span the two worlds of CAM practice and academia. How do they navigate between these domains, and how are their colle…
Just Knowledge’
In contemporary societies, the value and importance of knowledge is increasingly tied to its potential to generate profit. This raises questions about whether and how knowledge can, at the same time, be harnessed and valued for its capacity to advance social justice. In this paper, we consider these questions in relation to social work knowledge and academic research utilisation, setting our analysis in the context of broader debates on these the…
We need to talk about purpose
What Are the Professional, Political, and Ethical Challenges of Co-Creating Health Care Systems
Co-creation is seen by many as a means of meeting the multiple challenges facing contemporary health care systems by involving institutions, professionals, patients, and stakeholders in new roles, relationships, and collaborative practices. While co-creation has the potential to positively transform health care systems, it generates a number of political and ethical challenges that should not be overlooked. We suggest that those involved in envis…
Co-Creating an Expansive Health Care Learning System
How should practices of co-creation be integrated into health professions education? Although co-creation permits a variety of interpretations, we argue that realizing a transformative vision of co-creation-one that invites professionals to genuinely reconsider the purposes, relationships, norms, and priorities of health care systems through new forms of collaborative thought and practice-will require radically rethinking existing approaches to p…
Shared Decision Making in Israeli Social Services
Over the past decades, social policies in Israel have been characterised by a growing trend towards involving social service clients in decision-making processes. Drawing on interviews with seventy-seven social workers from various backgrounds employed in a range of organisations and positions, the current study sought to illuminate the contested nature of shared decision making (SDM), the practice and policy dilemmas it generates, and the readin…
What Justice, What Autonomy? The Ethical Constraints upon Personalisation
This article considers the ethical dimensions of attempts to ‘personalise’ health and social care services in the UK. Personalisation is identified as closely related to efforts to introduce elements of neoliberal marketisation into public service provision, particularly through the introduction of consumer choice for services users. We consider two areas of ethical concern surrounding personalisation: its contribution to social justice agendas a…
The dispositions of things
This article explores power relations between clinicians, patients and families as clinicians engage in patient-centred ethical work. Specifically, we draw on actor-network theory to interrogate the role of non-human elements in distributing power relations in clinical settings, as clinicians attempt to manage the expectations of patients and families. Using the activities of a multidisciplinary team providing deep brain stimulation to children w…
Personalisation in disability services and healthcare
Personalisation is a key term in contemporary British social policy. This article conceptualises personalisation as embodying two aspects – marketisation and social justice – and explores their interaction in discourses and practices of personalisation in disability services and healthcare. Comparing the application and reception of personalisation in these two social policy domains, the article identifies a tendency of marketisation to override …
The hollowed-out university? A critical analysis of changing institutional and academic norms in UK higher education
This article argues that UK universities are at risk from a process of ‘hollowing out’ – that is, of becoming institutions with no distinctive social role and no ethical raison d'etre – and that this is a process which undermines the possibilities for meaningful institutional and academic identities. It begins with a condensed, and necessarily partial, review of recent UK higher education policy trends to indicate the historical context and direc…
Neuroscientists' everyday experiences of ethics
The ethical issues neuroscience raises are subject to increasing attention, exemplified in the emergence of the discipline neuroethics. While the moral implications of neurotechnological developments are often discussed, less is known about how ethics intersects with everyday work in neuroscience and how scientists themselves perceive the ethics of their research. Drawing on observation and interviews with members of one UK group conducting neuro…
On being a (modern) scientist
In 2006, a small group of UK academic scientists made headlines when they proposed the creation of interspecies embryos - mixing human and animal genetic material. A public campaign was fought to mobilize support for the research. Drawing on interviews with the key scientists involved, this paper argues that engaging the public through communicating their ideas via the media can result in tensions between the necessity of, and inherent dangers in…
New welfare ethics and the remaking of moral identities in an era of user involvement
The shift towards greater user involvement in welfare provision is typically couched by its advocates as being ethically straightforward and as an unalloyed good, because it represents a transformation of users from a role of passivity and dependence on the paternalism of professionals to more active, empowered and respected autonomous persons. This paper problematises this reading, showing how it fails to represent the ethical complications of p…
L'éthique du nouvel État-providence et la recomposition des identités morales dans une ère de participation des usagers
Le déplacement vers une plus grande participation de l’usager dans les services d’aide sociale est présenté par ses avocats comme un bien parfait et de nature éthique parce qu’il correspondrait au passage des usagers d’un rôle passif dépendant du paternalisme des professionnels à un rôle plus actif les mobilisant comme des personnes et respectant leur autonomie. Cet article questionne cette lecture, en montrant qu’elle échoue à rendre compte des …
Representing 30 years of higher education change
This paper argues that the Times Higher provides a powerful tool for understanding the changing character of UK higher education (HE) and can usefully be seen as representative, and in some ways constitutive, of that changing character. Drawing on an analysis of a sample of stories from the Times Higher, it documents the changing policy climate of UK HE from 1979 to 2010. It offers a broadly chronological account of themes that have emerged as pr…
Ethical boundary-work in the embryonic stem cell laboratory
Most accounts of the ethics of stem cell research are de- contextualised reviews of the ethical and legal literature. In this chapter we present a socially embedded account of some of the ethical implications of stem cell research, from the perspectives of scientists directly involved in this area. Based on an ethnography of two leading embryonic stem cell laboratories in the UK, our data form part of the findings from a larger project mapping th…
From bench to bedside? Biomedical scientists' expectations of stem cell science as a future therapy for diabetes
Personalisation in disability services and healthcare
Personalisation is a key term in contemporary British social policy. This article conceptualises personalisation as embodying two aspects – marketisation and social justice – and explores their interaction in discourses and practices of personalisation in disability services and healthcare. Comparing the application and reception of personalisation in these two social policy domains, the article identifies a tendency of marketisation to override …
Plural conceptions of social justice
Concern with multi-faceted or 'plural' conceptions of justice has grown within policy sociology. This paper briefly summarizes some of the dimensions and facets of such plural models and considers their implications for policy sociology. Three implications, in particular, are considered. It is suggested that: first, plural models of justice substantially enlarge the agenda of evaluation; second, tensions within and between different facets of jus…
Patient-doctor decision-making about treatment within the consultation-A critical analysis of models
He just had a different way of showing it
This article draws on qualitative in depth interviews with mothers and fathers in thirty‐five families in which a child has been diagnosed with cancer. Gendered patterns in which mothers and fathers deal differently with both emotions and emotional needs when their child has cancer are examined. It is argued that the gender dynamics which develop are the consequences of a complex mixture of external constraints and internal inclinations. The rese…
Managing ethical uncertainty
This article illustrates and discusses the idea of 'implicit normativity', and specifically its relevance to the management of ethical uncertainty. In particular I consider (i) the role implicit normativity plays in masking and containing potential ethical uncertainty and (ii) the contrast and boundary between implicit normativity and 'overt ethics' where ethical contestation - as well as particular processes and agents - are highlighted as salie…
The dispositions of things
This article explores power relations between clinicians, patients and families as clinicians engage in patient-centred ethical work. Specifically, we draw on actor-network theory to interrogate the role of non-human elements in distributing power relations in clinical settings, as clinicians attempt to manage the expectations of patients and families. Using the activities of a multidisciplinary team providing deep brain stimulation to children w…
Neuroscientists' everyday experiences of ethics
The ethical issues neuroscience raises are subject to increasing attention, exemplified in the emergence of the discipline neuroethics. While the moral implications of neurotechnological developments are often discussed, less is known about how ethics intersects with everyday work in neuroscience and how scientists themselves perceive the ethics of their research. Drawing on observation and interviews with members of one UK group conducting neuro…
New Labour's Socially Responsible Museum
By reference to key policy texts and the discourses and arguments within which they are embedded, in this paper we trace the discursive genealogy of a new public service: the museum sector. We examine the ways in which recent UK government and related policy agencies have extended, multiplied and refracted normative, regulatory and operative conceptions of the social function of museums. Over the last ten years in particular policy discourses hav…
The hollowed-out university? A critical analysis of changing institutional and academic norms in UK higher education
This article argues that UK universities are at risk from a process of ‘hollowing out’ – that is, of becoming institutions with no distinctive social role and no ethical raison d'etre – and that this is a process which undermines the possibilities for meaningful institutional and academic identities. It begins with a condensed, and necessarily partial, review of recent UK higher education policy trends to indicate the historical context and direc…
Representing 30 years of higher education change
This paper argues that the Times Higher provides a powerful tool for understanding the changing character of UK higher education (HE) and can usefully be seen as representative, and in some ways constitutive, of that changing character. Drawing on an analysis of a sample of stories from the Times Higher, it documents the changing policy climate of UK HE from 1979 to 2010. It offers a broadly chronological account of themes that have emerged as pr…
Towards An Ethical Audit of the Privatisation of Education
We argue that the privatisation of education needs to be understood through an ethical lens, and suggest a broad framework through which privatisation policies and practices might be ethically audited. These policies and practices – it is suggested – are creating new ethical spaces and new clusters of goals, obligations and dispositions. Whatever the merits of our particular reading of these changes, we would call for an urgent public debate on t…
Differing to agree
In this paper Gewirtz and Cribb offer a response to Hammersley and Abraham's criticisms of their arguments about the place of values in social research published in this issue of BJSE. In doing so, they make clear that most of the positions that Hammersley and Abraham attribute to them are ones that they do not identify with and that, like Hammersley and Abraham, they would reject. In order to further clarify and specify their own position, Gewir…
What to do about values in social research
This paper is intended as a contribution to the longstanding debate about the best way of handling value judgements in social research. In it we make a case for more ‘ethical reflexivity’ in the sociology of education and argue that a systematic attention to value questions should be viewed as a taken‐for‐granted component of methodological rigour. We elucidate what we mean by ethical reflexivity, why we think it is important and suggest what it …
Towards the reflexive medical school
In this article it is argued that the agenda and culture of reform about teaching and learning in UK medical schools needs to be underpinned by a similar liberalisation of medical education research, and in particular by the fostering of more interpretative and reflexive research paradigms. The authors draw upon the sociology of medical education to illustrate how the key tensions inherent in the professional socialisation of doctors—between 'obj…
Talking it better
In this paper, we consider the role of conversations in contributing to healthcare quality improvement. More specifically, we suggest that conversations can be important in responding to what we call 'normative complexity'. As well as reflecting on the value of conversations, the aim is to introduce the dimension of normative complexity as something that requires theoretical and practical attention alongside the more recognised challenges of comp…
What works? Academic integrity and the research-policy relationship
In this paper, we consider the intensifying pressures on critical research and academic integrity in a research policy context that has come to be increasingly dominated by an instrumentalist mind-set. Using sensitising resources drawn from Geoff Whitty’s critique of the ‘what works’ agenda, we reflect on the current conditions of academic labour and some of the key issues and dilemmas they pose for critical researchers in the sociology of educat…
New welfare ethics and the remaking of moral identities in an era of user involvement
The shift towards greater user involvement in welfare provision is typically couched by its advocates as being ethically straightforward and as an unalloyed good, because it represents a transformation of users from a role of passivity and dependence on the paternalism of professionals to more active, empowered and respected autonomous persons. This paper problematises this reading, showing how it fails to represent the ethical complications of p…
Understanding pharmacists' values
What Becomes of Science in a Science Centre? Reconfiguring Science for Public Consumption
This paper draws upon ten interviews conducted with staff at two science centres as part of a research project on science centres and social and cultural inclusion. We will argue that these science
Doctoral student supervision in a managerial climate
This paper is organized around a single interview with an academic colleague who was asked to reflect on his changing experience of Ph.D. supervision. Material from the interview is used to raise some questions about the nature of responsible supervision in the humanities and social sciences, and the ways in which the possibilities for responsible supervision in the UK are constructed by the effects of the audit culture in higher education (HE). …
Professional identity and epistemic stress
Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) degrees in Australian and British universities have come under attack from sceptics who argue that such courses teach only ‘pseudoscience’. Moreover, CAM academics have themselves been publicly labelled ‘quacks’. Comparatively little is known about this group of health professionals who span the two worlds of CAM practice and academia. How do they navigate between these domains, and how are their colle…
What Justice, What Autonomy? The Ethical Constraints upon Personalisation
This article considers the ethical dimensions of attempts to ‘personalise’ health and social care services in the UK. Personalisation is identified as closely related to efforts to introduce elements of neoliberal marketisation into public service provision, particularly through the introduction of consumer choice for services users. We consider two areas of ethical concern surrounding personalisation: its contribution to social justice agendas a…
Varieties of improvement expertise
The 'improvement' of health care is now established and growing as a field of research and practice. This article, based on qualitative data from interviews with 21 senior leaders in this field, analyses the growth of improvement expertise as not simply an expansion but also a multiplication of 'ways of knowing'. It illustrates how health-care improvement is an area where contests about relevant kinds of knowledge, approaches and purposes prolife…
Ethical dilemmas in health promotion
He just had a different way of showing it
This article draws on qualitative in depth interviews with mothers and fathers in thirty‐five families in which a child has been diagnosed with cancer. Gendered patterns in which mothers and fathers deal differently with both emotions and emotional needs when their child has cancer are examined. It is argued that the gender dynamics which develop are the consequences of a complex mixture of external constraints and internal inclinations. The rese…
Towards the reflexive medical school
In this article it is argued that the agenda and culture of reform about teaching and learning in UK medical schools needs to be underpinned by a similar liberalisation of medical education research, and in particular by the fostering of more interpretative and reflexive research paradigms. The authors draw upon the sociology of medical education to illustrate how the key tensions inherent in the professional socialisation of doctors—between 'obj…
Plural conceptions of social justice
Concern with multi-faceted or 'plural' conceptions of justice has grown within policy sociology. This paper briefly summarizes some of the dimensions and facets of such plural models and considers their implications for policy sociology. Three implications, in particular, are considered. It is suggested that: first, plural models of justice substantially enlarge the agenda of evaluation; second, tensions within and between different facets of jus…
Towards An Ethical Audit of the Privatisation of Education
We argue that the privatisation of education needs to be understood through an ethical lens, and suggest a broad framework through which privatisation policies and practices might be ethically audited. These policies and practices – it is suggested – are creating new ethical spaces and new clusters of goals, obligations and dispositions. Whatever the merits of our particular reading of these changes, we would call for an urgent public debate on t…
What Becomes of Science in a Science Centre? Reconfiguring Science for Public Consumption
This paper draws upon ten interviews conducted with staff at two science centres as part of a research project on science centres and social and cultural inclusion. We will argue that these science
Doctoral student supervision in a managerial climate
This paper is organized around a single interview with an academic colleague who was asked to reflect on his changing experience of Ph.D. supervision. Material from the interview is used to raise some questions about the nature of responsible supervision in the humanities and social sciences, and the ways in which the possibilities for responsible supervision in the UK are constructed by the effects of the audit culture in higher education (HE). …
What to do about values in social research
This paper is intended as a contribution to the longstanding debate about the best way of handling value judgements in social research. In it we make a case for more ‘ethical reflexivity’ in the sociology of education and argue that a systematic attention to value questions should be viewed as a taken‐for‐granted component of methodological rigour. We elucidate what we mean by ethical reflexivity, why we think it is important and suggest what it …
From bench to bedside? Biomedical scientists' expectations of stem cell science as a future therapy for diabetes
Patient-doctor decision-making about treatment within the consultation-A critical analysis of models
Ethical boundary-work in the embryonic stem cell laboratory
Most accounts of the ethics of stem cell research are de- contextualised reviews of the ethical and legal literature. In this chapter we present a socially embedded account of some of the ethical implications of stem cell research, from the perspectives of scientists directly involved in this area. Based on an ethnography of two leading embryonic stem cell laboratories in the UK, our data form part of the findings from a larger project mapping th…
From Core Set to Assemblage
From Core Set to Assemblage: On the Dynamics of Exclusion and Inclusion in the Failure to Derive Beta Cells from Embryonic Stem Cells** In this paper, we examine the controversy surrounding the Lumelsky protocol (which potentially could have transformed the procedures for differentiating embryonic stem cells into beta cells for diabetes treatment). The protocol is analyzed initially using Collins’ core set model to show how the controversy over e…
Remaking the body? Scientists' genetic discourses and practices as examples of changing expectations on embryonic stem cell therapy for diabetes
AbstratIn this paper we discuss genetic discourses and practices in stem cell science. We report on how biomedical scientists, in both the UK and the USA, view the scientific literature and their own experimental research in the emerging field of human embryonic stem (hES) cells. We focus on the genetic manipulation of stem cells to make specialized (beta) cells as a potential cure for diabetes. We draw on Gieryn's notion of boundary work as an a…
Befriending the family
This paper explores the relationship between one group of nurses (specialist paediatric oncology nurses, or ‘SPONs’) and the families for whom they care. It draws upon a recent research review of their role in linking hospital and home care for children with cancer, and it argues that whereas this relationship often contains elements of friendship, it is not friendship in the conventional sense of the term, but is perhaps better characterized as …
New Labour's Socially Responsible Museum
By reference to key policy texts and the discourses and arguments within which they are embedded, in this paper we trace the discursive genealogy of a new public service: the museum sector. We examine the ways in which recent UK government and related policy agencies have extended, multiplied and refracted normative, regulatory and operative conceptions of the social function of museums. Over the last ten years in particular policy discourses hav…
Differing to agree
In this paper Gewirtz and Cribb offer a response to Hammersley and Abraham's criticisms of their arguments about the place of values in social research published in this issue of BJSE. In doing so, they make clear that most of the positions that Hammersley and Abraham attribute to them are ones that they do not identify with and that, like Hammersley and Abraham, they would reject. In order to further clarify and specify their own position, Gewir…
Que faire des valeurs en sciences sociales ? Pour une réflexivité éthique en sociologie de l'éducation
L’objectif est ici de contribuer au vieux débat sur la meilleure façon de traiter les jugements de valeur en sciences sociales. Nous plaidons pour une plus grande réflexivité éthique en sociologie de l’éducation et défendons l’idée que la prise en compte systématique des questions de valeur devrait être considérée comme une composante naturelle de la rigueur méthodologique. Qu’entendons-nous par réflexivité éthique, pourquoi cette notion paraît-e…
Understanding pharmacists' values
Supporting Patient Autonomy
Philosophy, health services and research
Shared decision making
Shared decision-making approaches, by recognizing the autonomy and responsibility of both health professionals and patients, aim for an ethical 'middle way' between 'paternalistic' and 'consumerist' models of clinical decision making. Shared decision making has been understood in various ways. In this paper, we distinguish narrow and broader conceptions of shared decision making and explore their relative strengths and weaknesses. In the first pa…
Beyond binaries in medical knowledge
chamado à reflexividade epistemológica
On being a (modern) scientist
In 2006, a small group of UK academic scientists made headlines when they proposed the creation of interspecies embryos - mixing human and animal genetic material. A public campaign was fought to mobilize support for the research. Drawing on interviews with the key scientists involved, this paper argues that engaging the public through communicating their ideas via the media can result in tensions between the necessity of, and inherent dangers in…
New welfare ethics and the remaking of moral identities in an era of user involvement
The shift towards greater user involvement in welfare provision is typically couched by its advocates as being ethically straightforward and as an unalloyed good, because it represents a transformation of users from a role of passivity and dependence on the paternalism of professionals to more active, empowered and respected autonomous persons. This paper problematises this reading, showing how it fails to represent the ethical complications of p…
L'éthique du nouvel État-providence et la recomposition des identités morales dans une ère de participation des usagers
Le déplacement vers une plus grande participation de l’usager dans les services d’aide sociale est présenté par ses avocats comme un bien parfait et de nature éthique parce qu’il correspondrait au passage des usagers d’un rôle passif dépendant du paternalisme des professionnels à un rôle plus actif les mobilisant comme des personnes et respectant leur autonomie. Cet article questionne cette lecture, en montrant qu’elle échoue à rendre compte des …
Sociology (39 obras) · Political science (35 obras) · Law (21 obras) · Social science (21 obras) · Psychology (20 obras) · Public relations (19 obras) · Epistemology (18 obras) · Engineering ethics (15 obras) · Law (13 obras) · Philosophy (11 obras)