Discourses of collaborative medical work
-
Per Måseide
Is a professor in sociology at the School of Social Sciences, Bodo University College, Norway. He teaches sociology of health and illness, social interactionism, and qualitative methodology. He has done extensive research on psychiatric healthcare services, doctor–patient interaction, and multiprofessional interaction and collaboration in medical problem solving in somatic hospital wards. He is now involved in research on disability.
Abstract
This article looks at the hospital as an expert system organized to promote distributed processes of collaborative medical problem solving. It is composed by subsystems and the collaborative processes resemble processes of socially distributed cognition. Terms like ‘medical discourse’ or ‘institutional interaction’ have been used to describe verbal activities in collaborative medical practice. But the definitions of these terms give a limited understanding of collaborative medicine. Observations of medical practice in a thoracic ward show that medical discourses work at institutional, professional, and moral levels. They deal with a multiplicity of problem types, involve a diversity of human and nonhuman agents, and take place within and generate complex layers of contexts. The development of the problem complex has to be professionally but subtly managed at an interactional level to reach conclusions that are institutionally, professionally, and morally acceptable. While extra-situational contexts may have a strong impact on these processes, medical problems are met and dealt with as concrete situational tasks, in restricted settings with different but concrete participants that operate within and generate local, linguistic, and interactional contexts.
About the author
Is a professor in sociology at the School of Social Sciences, Bodo University College, Norway. He teaches sociology of health and illness, social interactionism, and qualitative methodology. He has done extensive research on psychiatric healthcare services, doctor–patient interaction, and multiprofessional interaction and collaboration in medical problem solving in somatic hospital wards. He is now involved in research on disability.
© Walter de Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Editorial: The anatomy of interpretation: Coming to terms with the analyst's paradox in professional discourse studies
- Introduction: Aaron V. Cicourel and the emergence of critical perspectives on social scientific inquiry
- Aaron Cicourel's contributions to language use, theory, method, and measurement
- Discourses of collaborative medical work
- Distributed knowledge, distributed power: A sociolinguistics of structuration
- Discourses in European Union organizations: Aspects of access, participation, and exclusion
- The Gallup poll, democracy, and the vox populi: Ideologies of interviewing and the communicability of modern life
- Global markets as global conversations
- A personal, retrospective view of ecological validity
- Bibliography: Aaron V. Cicourel
- Index of articles in Volume 27 (2007)
Articles in the same Issue
- Editorial: The anatomy of interpretation: Coming to terms with the analyst's paradox in professional discourse studies
- Introduction: Aaron V. Cicourel and the emergence of critical perspectives on social scientific inquiry
- Aaron Cicourel's contributions to language use, theory, method, and measurement
- Discourses of collaborative medical work
- Distributed knowledge, distributed power: A sociolinguistics of structuration
- Discourses in European Union organizations: Aspects of access, participation, and exclusion
- The Gallup poll, democracy, and the vox populi: Ideologies of interviewing and the communicability of modern life
- Global markets as global conversations
- A personal, retrospective view of ecological validity
- Bibliography: Aaron V. Cicourel
- Index of articles in Volume 27 (2007)
