Managing Medical Authority: How Doctors Compete for Status and Create Knowledge
How the authority of medicine is continuously shaped by relationships among physicians, industry, colleagues, and organizations

Exploring how the authority of medicine is controlled, negotiated, and organized, Managing Medical Authority asks: How is knowledge shared throughout the profession? Who makes decisions when your heart malfunctions—physicians, hospital administrators, or private companies who sell pacemakers? How do physicians gain and keep their influence? Arguing that medicine’s authority is managed in collegial competition across venues, Daniel Menchik examines the full range of stakeholders driving the direction of the field: medical trainees, clinicians, researchers, administrators, and even the corporations that develop groundbreaking technologies enabling longer and better lives.

Menchik takes us into Superior Hospital to witness surgeries and executive negotiations. He moves outside the hospital to watch professional committees craft standards for treatments, case management, and professional ethics. At industry-sponsored meetings, he observes company representatives who train some experienced doctors on their technologies, while deterring others who they think might injure patients. Using an innovative ethnographic approach tying individual actions and their collective consequences, he considers how stakeholders ally across the various venues of medicine, even as they are sometimes pressed into competition within those venues. Menchik finds that these alliances and rivalries strengthen the authority of medicine as a whole. From place to place, and group to group, we see how a medical specialty renews and reinvigorates itself.

Beginning within the walls of the hospital, and moving to the professional and commercial venues that shape it, Managing Medical Authority offers an agenda-setting take on the social organization of medical authority.

1139308018
Managing Medical Authority: How Doctors Compete for Status and Create Knowledge
How the authority of medicine is continuously shaped by relationships among physicians, industry, colleagues, and organizations

Exploring how the authority of medicine is controlled, negotiated, and organized, Managing Medical Authority asks: How is knowledge shared throughout the profession? Who makes decisions when your heart malfunctions—physicians, hospital administrators, or private companies who sell pacemakers? How do physicians gain and keep their influence? Arguing that medicine’s authority is managed in collegial competition across venues, Daniel Menchik examines the full range of stakeholders driving the direction of the field: medical trainees, clinicians, researchers, administrators, and even the corporations that develop groundbreaking technologies enabling longer and better lives.

Menchik takes us into Superior Hospital to witness surgeries and executive negotiations. He moves outside the hospital to watch professional committees craft standards for treatments, case management, and professional ethics. At industry-sponsored meetings, he observes company representatives who train some experienced doctors on their technologies, while deterring others who they think might injure patients. Using an innovative ethnographic approach tying individual actions and their collective consequences, he considers how stakeholders ally across the various venues of medicine, even as they are sometimes pressed into competition within those venues. Menchik finds that these alliances and rivalries strengthen the authority of medicine as a whole. From place to place, and group to group, we see how a medical specialty renews and reinvigorates itself.

Beginning within the walls of the hospital, and moving to the professional and commercial venues that shape it, Managing Medical Authority offers an agenda-setting take on the social organization of medical authority.

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Managing Medical Authority: How Doctors Compete for Status and Create Knowledge

Managing Medical Authority: How Doctors Compete for Status and Create Knowledge

by Daniel A. Menchik
Managing Medical Authority: How Doctors Compete for Status and Create Knowledge

Managing Medical Authority: How Doctors Compete for Status and Create Knowledge

by Daniel A. Menchik

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Overview

How the authority of medicine is continuously shaped by relationships among physicians, industry, colleagues, and organizations

Exploring how the authority of medicine is controlled, negotiated, and organized, Managing Medical Authority asks: How is knowledge shared throughout the profession? Who makes decisions when your heart malfunctions—physicians, hospital administrators, or private companies who sell pacemakers? How do physicians gain and keep their influence? Arguing that medicine’s authority is managed in collegial competition across venues, Daniel Menchik examines the full range of stakeholders driving the direction of the field: medical trainees, clinicians, researchers, administrators, and even the corporations that develop groundbreaking technologies enabling longer and better lives.

Menchik takes us into Superior Hospital to witness surgeries and executive negotiations. He moves outside the hospital to watch professional committees craft standards for treatments, case management, and professional ethics. At industry-sponsored meetings, he observes company representatives who train some experienced doctors on their technologies, while deterring others who they think might injure patients. Using an innovative ethnographic approach tying individual actions and their collective consequences, he considers how stakeholders ally across the various venues of medicine, even as they are sometimes pressed into competition within those venues. Menchik finds that these alliances and rivalries strengthen the authority of medicine as a whole. From place to place, and group to group, we see how a medical specialty renews and reinvigorates itself.

Beginning within the walls of the hospital, and moving to the professional and commercial venues that shape it, Managing Medical Authority offers an agenda-setting take on the social organization of medical authority.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780691223544
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Publication date: 11/30/2021
Pages: 328
Product dimensions: 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Daniel A. Menchik is associate professor of sociology at the University of Arizona.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xiii

1 Introduction: Organizing Indeterminacy across Tethered Venues 1

2 Superior Hospital's Inpatient Wards : Grooming Patients and Socializing Trainees 36

3 Cardiac Electrophysiologists in the Lab: Achieving Good Hands and Dividing Labor 62

4 The Case of the Bed Management Program: Bureaucratic Influences and Professional Reputations 92

Interlude Multiple Stakeholders in Nonhospital Venues 130

5 Fellows Programs: Maintaining Status, Validating Knowledge, Strengthening Referral Networks, and Supporting Peers 132

6 Physicians and Medical Technology Companies at Hands-on Meetings: Strengthening the Occupational Project 161

7 The International Annual Meeting: Global-Local Feedback, and Setting Standards for Problems and Solutions 191

8 Conclusion: Managing Medicine's Authority into the Future 226

Appendix Methods 247

Notes 267

Works Cited 285

Index 299

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Reminiscent of classic medical ethnographies from the midcentury, Managing Medical Authority provides a much-needed update that will be required reading for students of the culture and organization of medicine. This fascinating, surprising, and unsettling book provides an unprecedented backstage view of the dynamics of medical authority and reveals how the medical profession maintains its power despite substantial challenges and change.”—Brea L. Perry, Indiana University

"Managing Medical Authority examines the internal stratification of electrophysiologists and offers an interesting exploration of the industry-clinical practice nexus. With telling details and in-depth research, this book makes a thought-provoking and stimulating contribution to medical sociology and the literature on professions."—Stefan Timmermans, University of California, Los Angeles

“Beautifully crafted, Managing Medical Authority gives us a sense of the worlds that electrophysiologists inhabit. There are many things to like about this mature piece of work.”—Peter Bearman, Columbia University

"This is a serious book about an important topic. Menchik looks into how medical specialists produce status through the procedures they carry out, their relationships with other doctors, and the companies that make the devices they use and host the conferences they go to. Solid and well-researched, Managing Medical Authority will appeal to medical sociologists and scholars of professions and expertise."—Kieran Healy, Duke University

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