Sociology: Agency vs. Structure

• Sociology offers theories to understand everyday life, moving beyond common-sense interpretations.
• Theories provide different viewpoints of ongoing events.

Agency vs. Structure

• Agency refers to individuals shaping society through their actions and choices.
• Individuals always possess some level of control and can choose to act differently.
• Micro-level actions can lead to societal change by breaking established norms.
• Agency introduces uncertainty and unpredictability.
• Structure involves societal forces shaping individuals.
• These forces include institutions, traditions and unquestioned norms.
• Macro-level institutions exert external influence.
• Structure provides predictability and stability through rules.
• Structure offers "ontological security" (Giddens).

The Social in Health, Disease, and Illness

• Sociological explanations explain health and illness beyond biological causes.
• Medical sociology studies the impact of contemporary social life on well-being throughout life.
• "Disease" is an objective condition affecting the body's normal function.
• "Illness" is an individuals' experience of that disease, and their coping strategies.
• Sociological perspectives on health consider structural and social factors.
• Factors such as age, social class, gender, and location influence health, infection risk, and the ability to fight infection.

Questions of Interest to Medical Sociologists

• How do people perceive and experience health and disease?
• How do social locations shape perceptions and experiences, including family background, socialization, media, culture, education, and occupation?
• How do interactions between patients, medical professionals, and caregivers occur?
• What patterns do diseases exhibit and how are they affected by society and social change?
• How is formal and informal healthcare organized in society?
• What social factors influence healthcare organization?

The Sociological Imagination

• The sociological imagination involves thinking past individual experiences and challenging common explanations.
• It involves focusing on power distribution, privilege, and non-privilege.
• Three questions for sociological imagination are:
  • The structure of a specific society.
  • How that structure fits into human history.
  • What varieties of people prevail in society during that time.
• Individuals understand their experience and fate by recognising their place and awareness of others in similar situations.

Functionalism

• Functionalism draws an analogy between society and a biological organism.
• Society, like a body, is made of interdependent parts working together.
• Interrelated and interdependent systems and sub-systems create stability to sustain the "whole".
• Achieving common individual values via a sub-system of cultural alignment depends on the central value system.
• Cohesiveness is crucial
• Social expectations involve role relationships with specific rights and obligations for social continuity.

Functionalism: "Sick Role" (Talcott Parsons)

• Sickness is a social role, not just a biological or physical event.
• The "sick role" excuses individuals from their normal duties.
• Medical professionals determine who is legitimately sick, acting as social control.
• The medical profession's regulatory role limits the number of people unable to fulfill societal roles.
• Illness can negatively affect society.
• Some sociologists identify different types of sick roles: conditional, unconditional, and illegitimate.

Symbolic Interactionism

• Social and natural sciences have very different study approaches.
• The focus is on human consciousness with humans understanding and viewing the social world.
• It questions common and commonplace aspects of cultures, especially assumptions of what is natural or normal.
• Regarding health, behaviors deemed "irrational" for health may differ between people.
• This concentrates on micro-interactions (agency), which downplays the impact of structural forces.

Marxism

• It emphasizes economic structures throughout history to explain conflicts between the powerful (minority) and the powerless (majority).
• Capitalism is defined as the modern conflict of owners vs those who sell labour, or the bourgeoisie versus the proletariat.
• Marxist theory challenges the idea that these arrangements are "natural", and therefore reveals patterns of exploitation and inequality.
• Inequalities in health between social classes exist and are the co-option between the "ruling class" and medical profession.

Feminism

• Feminism analyses social structures based on inequalities between men and women.
• Traditional focus of discipline ignores society elements, such as family and gender relations.
• Women and medicine involve control and surveillance of reproductive aspects.
• But also focuses on studies related to masculinity
• "Intersectionality" looks at features that determine privilege and disadvantage.

Biographical Disruption

• Michael Bury coined this term in 1982.
• Chronic or life-threatening illness disrupts an individual's cultural and social background and challenges ones self-identity.
• Being sick in modern society depends on available resources for how it happens and to whom.