Editorial

Abstract

This special edition of the journal Health Sociology Review seeks to showcase scholarship from academics working from within the sociology of health and illness in the UK. The work presented here is of course not meant to be in any way representative of the sociology of health and illness, but does highlight something of its vitality, range and energy. We see presented here a range of work drawing on primary empirical evidence, but also many more theoretically informed papers, drawing on (variously) the work of Deleuze, Habermas, Foucault and others. There is also a strong focus on mental health, the sociology of the professions and the organisation of health care, in its social context.In the fi rst paper in this series, Fox (2011) presents a theoretical paper which seeks to take forward the post-structuralist concerns of Deleuze and Guattari as they link with aspects of human embodiment. In the paper, Fox takes as his starting point the need to replace the organic body-with-organs as a unit for analysis in the sociology of health and illness, with an approach which derives from the work of Deleuze and Guattari, the body-without-organs (BwO). He achieves this through a detailed explication of how we might use these notions and the related Deleuzian ideas of assemblages and territorialisation, using a case study focused on a Viagra user in order to contextualise his arguments and to explore what he calls the shaping of the ill-health assemblage. Fox is concerned throughout, to recast through a Deleuzian ontology, how health and illness are situated and privileged within biomedicine and to see them through the lens of something more explicitly sociological.The second paper in this series stays with the theme of embodiment but it is more centrally concerned with explicating competing discourses which delineate the boundaries between chronic illness and ageing. Stevenson and Higgs (2011) take knee pain as their example and discuss differing cultures of ageing using discourse analysis to highlight how talk about illness and 'ageing well' is situated in a particular context, and how this talk has a particular meaning for those actors. In drawing together the various and competing discourses that surround ageing in late modern societies, they highlight that not only do older people need to maintain their health, but they must also actively demonstrate that they are doing this. They conclude with a discussion around the notion of a 'will to health' in the culture of the Third Age.In the third paper in this series, Coveney, Gabe, and Williams (2011) provide an interesting sociological commentary on new developments in drugs that provide enhancements to cognitive function. Their review critiques the notion of medicalisation and bio-medicalisation before moving onto consider whether the more recently introduced concept of pharmaceuticalisation might offer some conceptual purchase in this area. They conclude with an agenda for future research in this area, linking science and technology studies with the sociology of health and illness.The focus shifts somewhat in the fourth paper by Spyridonidis and Calnan (2011), to notions of professionalism through a discussion of the implementation of National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) guidelines. Their focus is on scientifi c bureaucratic medicine as central to the movement of evidence based medicine in the English NHS. This empirical paper looks at medical professionals' responses to scientifi c bureaucratic medicine and the control of autonomy within healthcare organisations. They identify three themes in professionals' accounts of their responses to scientifi c bureaucratic medicine, one which centred on organisational values and limited acceptance of NICE guidelines. By contrast, the second identifi ed theme centred on what is referred to as 'entrepreneurial professionalism', or the introduction of new ideas in clinical practice. This and the notion of clinical autonomy were used to account for a tendency to question the use of NICE guidance in practice. …