Sociology of Medicine: Orderly Heterogeneity Among Once-Settled Categories

In the half-century following its mid-century emergence, the sociology of medicine in the United States has been constituted by a theoretical vocabulary anchored in concepts of roles and professions, and a methodological commitment to ideal types. More recently, research has called attention to these foci in ways that prompt close attention to categories once considered relatively homogeneous. After briefly discussing the key emphases of early work, I review contemporary literature's most active areas and intersections, especially organizations, professions and labor, and science and knowledge. In particular, the review demonstrates the behavior of the literature's key stakeholders—such as doctors and hospitals—as displaying a certain orderly heterogeneity. That is, although variation and diversity are characteristic of medical work, this heterogeneity is not random. Rather, I show that practices are organized systematically to reflect and constitute local and global communities of health care users and providers. I identify how the corpus suggests that more work could be done across key topics of the sociology of medicine to enable theoretical synthesis of these empirical results.