The New Medical Sociology

The New Medical Sociology makes a bold and innovative investigation of how society makes us sick. The author, Bryan Turner, examines how macro processes like globalization, risk, economic deregulation, and technological change shape personal experiences of health and illness. Addressing key topics in contemporary sociology such as the body, power, and knowledge, Turner sets out to rethink medical sociology as an exciting perspective on the principal transformations of modern society.

In this broad historical and sociological work, Turner asks and answers how economic changes of recent decades have undermined both social cohesion and the conditions that promote good health. He explores the macro-level importance of social capital (people's involvement or investments in society), inequality, and citizenship rights in his explanation of health and illness in modern societies, and examines at the micro level embodiment (our relationship to our own bodies) in narratives of illness.

The New Medical Sociology is part of the Contemporary Societies series, Jeffrey Alexander, Series Editor. This series marks the coming of age of a generation and a discipline. It has been half a century since the world's leading sociologists engaged in a collective effort to make their cutting-edge thinking and research so concise and so widely accessible. What has changed in the meantime? Just about everything! Theoretical hegemony has given way to plurality. Disengagement has given way to relevance, and a provincial focus on America has opened up to the currents of globalization. Running through all these transformations has been the cultural turn, the recognition that meaning dynamics-codes, narratives, metaphors, values, and beliefs-remain central features of even the most contemporary societies. In this series, the world's leading sociologists show how these developments have transformed their specialties. They do so by engaging a genre that has almost disappeared from the social sciences today-the essay. Well-written, clear-minded, and elegant, these brief compositions are major creative endeavors in their own right, even as they bring the ideas of the world's most advanced thinkers into the world of the lay reader.