Control and Responsibility

Moral and Religious Issues in Lay Health Accounts

Bibliographic Data

ID3269729
AuthorsKenneth Mullen (0000-0002-3282-6734, MRC Medical Sociology Unit, Glasgow, corresponding author)
Year1994
Volume42
Issue3
Pages414-437
Publication date1994-08-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Sociological Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0038-0261 • E-ISSN: 1467-954X
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1111/j.1467-954x.1994.tb00095.x
OpenAlexW1995742830
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited20

In sociological work of an empirical nature the concept of control tends to have a taken-for-granted quality. Similarly in the field of medical sociology when control is mentioned in relation to health and illness it is often presented in a unidimensional manner. This article analyses the relationship between control and responsibility for health in the lay accounts of male Glaswegians. Activist and fatalist dimensions were found in their thinking. However, activist thinking was seen to have three strands: personal activism, social activism, and religious activism. Further, fatalistic thinking was not about passive submission but rather the belief that control lay outwith the person in the realm of the social, natural or supernatural worlds. These findings demonstrate the subtle ways in which people relate to issues of control and responsibility in the health realm - a subtlety which is not fully brought out either in the theoretical or empirical work of social scientists researching in the health field

Control (management) · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Fatalism · Field (mathematics) · Management · Moral responsibility · Political science · Politics · Realm · Relation (database) · Social control · Social science · Sociology · Law · Psychology · Religion and Society Interactions · Religion, Spirituality, and Psychology · Social Psychology

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