The words we die by.

Hospice is a venue organized to provide a "good death" for patients and family. Since many hospice patients are bedridden and often incoherent or unconscious, many of this venue's interactions take place between hospice professionals and patients' families. The families of patients desire definitive prognoses because knowing what to expect can help them decide how to act, but for professionals such knowledge is characterized by doubt.

Interdependent Career Types and Divergent Standpoints on the Use of Advanced Technology in Medicine.

This paper uses the case of the uneven use of a robotic technology to explain how physicians with similar training come to engage in different medical practices. I develop a conceptual framework in which their decisions to use advanced technologies are informed by "interdependent career types," a concept that incorporates features of the professional social context of physicians' work and the expertise they use, and reflects how medicine distributes expertise via formal and informal referral structures. I draw on data regarding specialized physicians' differentiated use of this technology over five years as well as interviews with those who continue to use the technology and those who have abandoned it.

Decisions about knowledge in medical practice: the effect of temporal features of a task.

A classic question of social science is how knowledge informs practice. Research on physicians' decisions about medical knowledge has focused on doctors' personal capabilities and features of the knowledge corpus, producing divergent findings. This study asks, instead, How is decision making about the use of knowledge influenced by features of work? From observations of one team's decisions in multiple clinical and administrative contexts, the author argues that making decisions is contingent upon temporal features of physicians' tasks.

When do doctors follow patients' orders? Organizational mechanisms of physician influence.

Physicians, like other professionals, are expected to draw from specialized knowledge while remaining receptive to clients' requests. Using nationally representative U.S.

Simmel's dynamic social medicine: new questions for studying medical institutions?

Over the last half century, changes in the structure of medicine have shifted the relationship between the profession of medicine and social institutions. In this paper, I uncover ideas for retheorizing this relationship by analyzing a review by Georg Simmel that has been previously overlooked. In an analytical overview and critical appraisal of Simmel's text, I argue that he considered preventative medical knowledge more influential when this knowledge is located outside the physician-patient relationship.

The cultivation of esteem and retrieval of scientific knowledge in physician networks.

This article evaluates how physicians draw upon scientific and other forms of knowledge in different professional communities. We argue that because physicians will draw upon clinical research findings to improve their reputation with colleagues, and because the terms for accruing esteem in an academic hospital may differ depending on the dominant task structure of the organization, the form of knowledge that is valued by a physician will vary with his or her hospital's level of prestige. We use social network and multivariate analyses to test this theory in six U.