Margin, Mission, and the Sociology of Profession: a conversation

Hospitals and health systems have become prime movers in US health care, employing more than 77% of the physician workforce and growing in scale through persistent market consolidation (Muoio 2024). These entities' business practices have recently come under sharp scrutiny for appearing to run contrary to some of the more idealistic norms of medicine. While the law is a valuable tool in discouraging and punishing bad organizational behavior, it frequently struggles to keep pace with a changing marketplace. What ethical concepts, if any, can provide a check or constraint on their behavior? Sociologist Fred Hafferty, one of the leading scholars of professionalism in medicine, explores these and other questions in conversation with ethicist and management scholar Lauren Taylor.