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"This book critically examines the concept of 'embeddedness': the core concept of an Economic Sociology of Law (ESL). It suggests that our ways of doing, talking, and thinking about law, economy, and society, reproduce and re-entrench mainstream approaches, shaping our thoughts and actions such that we perform according to the model. Taking a deep dive into one example - the concept of embeddedness - this book combines insights from law, sociology, economics, and psychology to show that while we use metaphor to talk about law and economy, our metaphors in turn use us, moulding us into their fictionalized caricatures of homo juridicus and homo economicus. The result is a ground-breaking study into the prioritization throughout society of interests and voices that align with doctrinal understandings of law and neoclassical understandings of economics: approaches that led us into the dilemmas currently facing society. Zooming out from a detailed exploration of embeddedness in economic sociology and ESL literature, the book unpacks the fashionable post-2008 claim that the economy should be re-embedded in society and proposes two conceptual shifts in response. The book draws on personas and vignettes throughout, both to imagine and to realise shifting an ESL beyond embeddedness. This timely engagement with the emerging field of Economic Sociology of Law will appeal to socio-legal scholars and others with interests in the intersection of law, economics and sociology"--

Embeddedness is the core concept of an economic sociology of law (ESL) lens, but is conceptually confused and inconsistent. We have seen how embeddedness can have a tangible impact on our ability to respond to pressing social dilemmas: financial crashes, social crises, and environmental catastrophes. This chapter enquires into the implications of moving ESL beyond embeddedness, asking if we remove the core concept of the lens, what remains? It then turns to how we might move broader discourse beyond embeddedness-talk, and what this could achieve. Finally, zooming out further, the chapter explores the wider ramifications for how we do, talk, and think about law, economy, and society. In looking forward, the chapter identifies an urgent need for research into the development of natural language processing (NLP) in artificial intelligence (AI), where biases, assumptions, and preferences intrinsic to our conceptual and linguistic tools are at risk of being preserved in digital aspic and placed beyond the reach of future interrogation. Our third fictional persona, Lay Lillian, takes centre stage in this chapter, as she wonders how the insights of previous chapters, explained to her by Academic Ann, can be brought to bear on the problems she is facing.

The way we talk matters. Human thought processes are largely metaphorical, but what happens when our metaphors for law, economy, and society are conceptually inconsistent or inadequate? By taking a deep dive into how we use one metaphor – embeddedness – this chapter shows that if our ways of talking and thinking about legal and economic phenomena are inconsistent, mainstream thoughtways are re-entrenched. At the same time, innovative or imaginative responses to the financial crashes, social crises, and environmental catastrophes facing society can be hidden. This chapter explores our mainstream ways of doing, talking, and thinking about the relationships between law, economy, and society, identifying problematic metaphors and the conceptual heavy lifting they are asked to perform. It also introduces the three personas who guide and ground the conceptual discussion throughout the book.

Cover -- Half Title -- Dedication -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Perspectives on Young People, Asthma and Diabetes -- 3 Mothers and Transitions to Gendered Independence -- 4 Responsibility Versus Autonomy - Mothers' Conflict? -- 5 Gendered Ways of Managing Chronic Illness -- 6 Gendered Dependencies and Responsibilities? -- 7 Conclusions -- Bibliography -- Index

While sets of constraints have become normalised in research production, the COVID-19 pandemic mandated shifts in research ontologies, epistemologies and methodologies. The society-wide, real-time experiment of the pandemic lockdowns constructed a set of prefigurative counterfactual contexts in which alternative structures and processes came to be, albeit briefly, normalised. Two examples illustrate the risks and opportunities that emerged. Firstly, the turn to autoethnography and creative methods offers a methodological challenge to the minoritisation of certain voices within the academy. Secondly, and more substantively, pivots in response to lockdowns offered glimpses of labour market inclusion best practice through the prefiguration of alternative workplace norms, suggesting the potential value of prefigurative counterfactuals as research method. Nevertheless, both methodological and substantive insights explored here in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic were mediated by technology which has the potential to reproduce embedded dominant epistemologies and ontologies.

We have all been disabled by Covid; routines interrupted, interactions curtailed, access denied. For many, this was a new and troubling form of existence. For some though, like me, this was normal life. As a socio-legal scholar who uses a wheelchair full time, exclusion from academic spaces, and the interactions that went on in those spaces, was the norm. And then Covid arrived. Lockdowns made working and socialising from home mandatory, and in the process, disabled the rest of society overnight. This had the ironic impact of levelling the playing field for those of us accustomed to exclusion by the built environment. This paper recounts my lived experiences of lockdown, and explores the results for those with physical impairments of the massive social experiment into virtual and hybrid working that was necessitated by the pandemic. It argues that by focusing on individual choice to determine future hybrid working arrangements, when for many that choice is not freely made, we risk further entrenching disadvantage. In the context of higher education and research, the result is the full realisation of the neoliberal academy in which scholars with disabilities are blamed for their own self-exclusion.

AbstractAn emerging body of literature in sociology has demonstrated that diagnosis is a useful focal point for understanding the social dimensions of health and illness. This article contributes to this work by drawing attention to the relationship between diagnostic spaces and the way in which clinicians use their own bodies during the diagnostic process. As a case study, we draw upon fieldwork conducted with a multidisciplinary clinical team providing deep brain stimulation (DBS) to treat children with a movement disorder called dystonia. Interviews were conducted with team members and diagnostic examinations were observed. We illustrate that clinicians use communicative body work and verbal communication to transform a material terrain into diagnostic space, and we illustrate how this diagnostic space configures forms of embodied 'sensing‐and‐acting' within. We argue that a 'diagnosis' can be conceptualised as emerging from an interaction in which space, the clinician‐body, and the patient‐body (or body‐part) mutually configure one another. By conceptualising diagnosis in this way, this article draws attention to the corporal bases of diagnostic power and counters Cartesian‐like accounts of clinical work in which the patient‐body is objectified by a disembodied medical discourse.

In this article we focus upon the embodiment of vulnerability as an area in which medicine, society and the humanities can be profitably conjoined. We illustrate our argument with two interrelated case studies of narratives of the embodiment of ageing and longevity. First, we draw upon Leoš Janáček's opera The Makropulos Case (1926) as a locus for debates about human longevity. Second, we discuss 70-year-old Janáček's decade of unrequited love for a woman 37 years younger than himself, through an examination of their intimate letters. We suggest that both the opera and elements of Janáček's biography illuminate the passionate emotions that are often hidden behind 'the mask of ageing'. Finally, we propose that a focus on the embodiment of vulnerability is a productive catalyst for research on narratives of ageing.

Social scientists have drawn attention to the role of hype and optimistic visions of the future in providing momentum to biomedical innovation projects by encouraging innovation alliances. In this article, we show how less optimistic, uncertain, and modest visions of the future can also provide innovation projects with momentum. Scholars have highlighted the need for clinicians to carefully manage the expectations of their prospective patients. Using the example of a pioneering clinical team providing deep brain stimulation to children and young people with movement disorders, we show how clinicians confront this requirement by drawing on their professional knowledge and clinical expertise to construct visions of the future with their prospective patients; visions which are personalized, modest, and tainted with uncertainty. We refer to this vision-constructing work as recalibration, and we argue that recalibration enables clinicians to manage the tension between the highly optimistic and hyped visions of the future that surround novel biomedical interventions, and the exigencies of delivering those interventions in a clinical setting. Drawing on work from science and technology studies, we suggest that recalibration enrolls patients in an innovation alliance by creating a shared understanding of how the "effectiveness" of an innovation shall be judged.

The British National Health Service (NHS) is based on principles of equal access, treatment and outcomes.This article reviews health professionals' aims to provide equitable prenatal services and their views on whether women could be equal in their access to services, understanding during choice-making, and satisfaction about their care. Inequalities which compromise equity, conflicting meanings of equity, and the contribution of in-hospital ethics seminars to ethical health services are considered. Qualitative research, combining sociological and philosophical methods, investigated the experiences of health care staff attempting to provide equitable services and their practical and ethical problems. A total of 70 staff at a teaching hospital and a district general hospital took part in semi-structured interviews, followed by 11 innovative in-hospital ethics seminars based on themes derived from the interviews.The 56 seminar participants usually began with clear statements of their equitable aims, but, encouraged by the health care ethicist, they went on to discuss their many concerns about obstacles which complicated the achievement of these aims. The sociological-ethics seminars provided unique opportunities for multi-disciplinary discussion of these inequalities and their impact on equitable intentions in health care. Analysis of the contradictions revealed during the seminars is guided by sociological theories that seek to explain the persistence of inequalities in health, and how NHS policies appear to perpetuate and increase them, despite practitioners' stated intentions to promote equality.

The aim in this article is to write an evocative ethnography of the embodiment of ballet as a cultural practice. The authors draw on their fieldwork at the Royal Ballet (London), where they conducted 20 in-depth interviews with ballet staff (and watched "the company at work" in class, rehearsal, and performance). They explored dancers' (n = 9) and ex-dancers' (who are now teachers, administrators, and character dancers; n = 11) perceptions of their bodies, dancing careers, and the major changes that have occurred in the world of ballet over their professional lives. They focus on their accounts of the homogenizing effects of globalization on the culture of the Royal Ballet. Although this research is set within the elite and narrow cultural field of dance, the authors hope that it is an interesting addition to broader debates on the interrelationships between individuals and institutions, the body and society, and globalization and culture.