Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-8bhkd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T13:01:06.099Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Medical and Familial Claims to Long-Term Care: Institutional Gaps and Shifting Jurisdictions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Abstract

In light of the contemporary long-term care crisis, Sandra Levitsky's book Caring for Our Own examines why there has been no movement to secure state support for caregivers. Speaking to sociolegal and social movement audiences, Levitsky reveals how lack of collective identity, the power of family-based ideologies, and the separation of support organizations from political ones help to repress mobilization. In this essay I refract Levitsky's findings through the lens of organizational theory and medical sociology. I argue that the social problem of long-term care is caught in an institutional gap since it does not readily fall under the purview of either medicine or family. I also discuss the implications of lay caregivers' provision of sophisticated medical care for theories of professional jurisdictions and gatekeeping.

Type
Review Essay
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abbott, Andrew.Status and Status Strain in the Professions.” American Journal of Sociology 86, no. 4 (1981): 819–35.Google Scholar
Abbott, Andrew. The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.Google Scholar
American Medical Association. “Opinion 8.19—Self‐Treatment or Treatment of Immediate Family Members.” AMA Code of Medical Ethics. American Medical Association, 1993. http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/2012/05/coet1-1205.html Google Scholar
Armstrong, Elizabeth M. Conceiving Risk, Bearing Responsibility: Fetal Alcohol Syndrome & the Diagnosis of Moral Disorder. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Arras, John D., and Dubler, Nancy Neveloff. “Bringing the Hospital Home: Ethical and Social Implications of High‐Tech Home Care.” Hastings Center Report 24, no. 5 (1994): S19S28.Google Scholar
Bianchi, Suzanne M., and Milkie, Melissa A.Work and Family Research in the First Decade of the 21st Century.” Journal of Marriage and Family 72, no. 3 (2010): 705–25.Google Scholar
Bosk, Charles L. All God's Mistakes: Genetic Counseling in a Pediatric Hospital. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Brint, Steven. In an Age of Experts: The Changing Role of Professionals in Politics and Public Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Brody, Howard.Economism and the Commercialization of Health Care.” Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 42 (2014): 501–8.Google Scholar
Charmaz, Kathy. Good Days, Bad Days: The Self in Chronic Illness and Time. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Chaufan, Claudia, Hollister, Brooke, Nazareno, Jennifer, and Fox, Patrick. “Medical Ideology as a Double‐Edged Sword: The Politics of Cure and Care in the Making of Alzheimer's Disease.” Social Science and Medicine 74, no. 5 (2012): 788–95.Google Scholar
Chiarello, Elizabeth.How Organizational Context Affects Bioethical Decision‐Making: Pharmacists' Management of Gatekeeping Processes in Retail and Hospital Settings.” Social Science and Medicine (2013). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2012.11.041.Google Scholar
Chiarello, Elizabeth.The War on Drugs Comes to the Pharmacy Counter: Frontline Work in the Shadow of Discrepant Institutional Logics.” Law and Social Inquiry 40, no. 1 (2015): 86122.Google Scholar
Conrad, Peter.Medicalization and Social Control.” Annual Review of Sociology 18 (1992): 209–32.Google Scholar
Conrad, Peter, and Muñoz, Vanessa Lopes. “The Medicalization of Chronic Pain.” Tidsskrift for Forskning i Sygdom og Samfund 7, no. 13 (2010): 13–24.Google Scholar
Conrad, Peter, and Schneider, Joseph W. Deviance and Medicalization, from Badness to Sickness. St. Louis, MO: Mosby, 1980.Google Scholar
Conrad, Peter, and Schneider, Joseph W. Deviance and Medicalization: From Badness to Sickness. Exp. ed. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Estes, Carroll L.The Aging Enterprise: In Whose Interests?International Journal of Health Services 16, no. 2 (1986): 243–51.Google Scholar
Estes, Carroll L., and Binney, Elizabeth A. 1989. “The Biomedicalization of Aging: Dangers and Dilemmas.” Gerontologist 29, no. 5 (1989): 587–96.Google Scholar
Estes, Carroll L., and Swan, James H. & Associates. “The Long Term Care Crisis: Elders Trapped in the No‐Care Zone.” Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1993.Google Scholar
Freidson, Eliot. Professional Dominance: The Social Structure of Medical Care. New York: Atherton Press, 1970.Google Scholar
Friedland, Roger, and Alford, Robert R.Bringing Society Back In: Symbols, Practices, and Institutional Contradictions.” In The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, edited by Powell, Walter W. and DiMaggio, Paul J., 232–63. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Glazer, Nona Y.The Home as Workshop: Women as Amateur Nurses and Medical Care Providers.” Gender and Society 4, no. 4 (1990): 479–99.Google Scholar
Greenberg, David F. The Construction of Homosexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.Google Scholar
Gusfield, Joseph R. Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1986.Google Scholar
Heimer, Carol A.Competing Institutions: Law, Medicine, and Family in Neonatal Intensive Care.” Law and Society Review 33, no. 1 (1999): 1766.Google Scholar
Hochschild, Arlie, and Machung, Anne. The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home. New York: Penguin Books, 2012.Google Scholar
Irvine, Janice M.Reinventing Perversion: Sex Addiction and Cultural Anxieties.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 5, no. 3 (1995): 429–50.Google Scholar
Jacobs, Jerry A., and Gerson, Kathleen. The Time Divide: Work, Family, and Gender Inequality, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Larson, Magali Sarfatti. The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977.Google Scholar
Levitsky, Sandra R. Caring for Our Own: Why There Is No Political Demand for New American Social Welfare Rights. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Lyon, Dawn.Intersections and Boundaries of Work and Non‐Work: The Case of Eldercare in Comparative European Perspective.” European Societies 12, no. 2 (2010): 163–85.Google Scholar
Magnussen, Jon, Vrangbaek, Karsten, and Saltman, Richard. Nordic Health Care Systems: Recent Reforms and Current Policy Challenges. New York: McGraw‐Hill Open University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Pavalko, Eliza K.Caregiving and the Life Course: Connecting the Personal and the Public.” In Handbook of Sociology of Aging, 603–16. New York: Springer, 2011.Google Scholar
Perry, Joshua E., and Stone, Robert C.In the Business of Dying: Questioning the Commercialization of Hospice.” Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 39, no. 2 (2011): 224–34.Google Scholar
Relman, Arnold S. 1980. “The New Medical‐Industrial Complex.” New England Journal of Medicine 303, no. 17 (1980): 963–70.Google Scholar
Starr, Paul. The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry. New York: Basic Books, 1982.Google Scholar
Thornton, Patricia H., and Ocasio, William. “Institutional Logics.” In The Sage Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism, 99129. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2008.Google Scholar
Thornton, Patricia H., Ocasio, William, and Lounsbury, Michael. The Institutional Logics Perspective: A New Approach to Culture, Structure, and Process. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Ward‐Griffin, Catherine, and Marshall, Victor W.Reconceptualizing the Relationship Between ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Eldercare.” Journal of Aging Studies 17, no. 2 (2003): 189208.Google Scholar
Wood, Juanita B., and Estes, Carroll L.'Medicalization' of Community Services for the Elderly.” Health and Social Work 13, no. 1 (1988): 3542.Google Scholar
Zola, I. K.Medicine as a Institution of Social Control.” Sociological Review 20 (1972): 487504.Google Scholar