Abstract
ABSTRACTIn this explicitly sociological contribution I discern and explore a number of dimensions of vulnerability with potential relevance to people’s health, health-related quality of life and lo...
Highlights
Vulnerability comes in many shapes and sizes and can in the right circumstances lead to impaired health and even premature death
Biological and psychological mechanisms are in play, though social mechanisms do not reduce to them: genes, a multiplicity of the right kind of combinations of cells and an internal locus of control may well be crucial ingredients for winning performances at Wimbledon, but as yet only “people” have emerged victorious, and personhood can only be fully articulated in the context of social relations
I have maintained in this paper that social mechanisms contribute causally to health disadvantage via different types of vulnerability, in the process insisting that the world we collectively inhabit admits of causal instruction from a profusion of mechanisms deriving from different and biological through psychological to social ontological strata
Summary
Vulnerability comes in many shapes and sizes and can in the right circumstances lead to impaired health and even premature death. Biological and psychological mechanisms are in play, though social mechanisms do not reduce to them: genes, a multiplicity of the right kind of combinations of cells and an internal locus of control may well be crucial ingredients for winning performances at Wimbledon, but as yet only “people” have emerged victorious, and personhood can only be fully articulated in the context of social relations. What this means is that while the social is irreducible to the biological and psychological, it can only contribute a few pieces of an unbelievably rich jigsaw. I shall contend, “useful” for the construction of sociological explanations of vulnerabilityinduced health disadvantage
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