Health and the Division of Labour

Originally published in 1978, Health and the Division of Labour examines problems and tensions experienced in health work. The papers analyse inter- and intra-occupational rivalry and consider the impact of new forms of managerial rationality upon the traditional divisions of tasks and prestige in health work. The issues raised here affect public policy in both Britain and the USA: Americans can profit from British work on the position of women in medicine, on unionisation and on managerialism, Britons can learn from Americans work on the political context of both social science and medicine, in looking at renal dialysis policy and at the problems of fieldwork in Latin America.

Margaret Stacey, Margaret Reid, Christian Heath, Robert Dingwall

Introduction 1. The Futures of Professionalisation 2. The Role of the Medical Profession in a Non-Democratic Country: The Case of Spain 3. Home Dialysis and Sociomedical Policy 4. Responsibility in General Practice 5. Women in the Medical Profession: Whose Problem? 6. The Division of Labour among the Mental Health Professions - a Negotiated or an Imposed Order? 7. The New Managerialism and Professionalism in Nursing 8. Management, the Professions and the Unions: A Social Analysis of Change in the National Health Service 9. Misapplied Cross-Cultural Research: A Case Study of an Ill-Fated Family Planning Research Project Contributors