In this paper we examine the application of informed consent to ethnographic research in health care settings. We do not quarrel with either the principle of informed consent or its translation into the requirement that research should only be carried out with consenting participants. However,...

Doctor/patient interaction has been the object of various reform efforts in Western countries since the 1960s. It has consistently been depicted as enacting relationships of dominance or oppression. Most younger medical practitioners have received interaction skills training during their...

This Special Issue of Social Science & Medicine investigates the potential for positive inter-disciplinary interaction, a ‘generative dance’, between organization studies (OS), and two of the journal’s traditional disciplinary foundations: health policy and medical sociology. This is both...

Research into child abuse and its interpretation has been bedevilled by controversy over questions of definition and appropriate approaches. It is suggested in this paper that different questions require different approaches, and that the use of both sociological and medical models may be...