Social Movements and the Transformation of American Health Care

Social Movements and the Transformation of American Health Care is the first collection of essays to examine dynamics of change in health care institutions through the lens of contemporary theory and research on collective action. Bringing together scholars from medicine, health management and policy, history, sociology, and political science, the book conceptualizes the American health care system as being organized around multiple institutions-includingthe state, biomedical fields, professions, and health delivery organizations. By shifting attention toward the organizing structures and political logics of these institutions, the essays in this book illuminate the diversity in both sites of health-related collective action and the actors seekingtransformations in health institutions.The book considers health-related social movements at four distinct levels of analysis. At the most macro level, essays analyze social movements that seek changes from the state in the regulation, financing, and distribution of health resources, including private and public insurance coverage, service delivery, and clinical research. A second set of essays considers field-level analyses of institutional changes in such wide-ranging areas as public health, bio-ethics, long-term care,abortion, and AIDS services. A third set of essays examines the relationship between social movements and professions, examining the "boundary crossing¨that occurs when professionals participate in social movements or seek changes in existing professions and the health practices they endorse. A final set ofessays analyzes the cultural dominance of the medical model for addressing health problems in the United States and its implications for collective attempts to establish the legitimacy of particular issues, framings, and political actors in health care reform.

A volume that fills a major gap - a theoretically rich, very well integrated, and quite timely collection by a distinguished group of scholars that illuminates the role of social movements and collective action in the transformation of the U.S. health care system., Social Movements and the Transformation of American Health Care succeeds wonderfully in the editors' objective to bridge the divide between scholarship in the field of social movements and that of health care. As issues relating to health become ever more central in American politics and culture, the essays in this volume offer unusually valuable insights into this crucial and contested terrain., This is a compelling and innovative collection that opens an analytically fruitful and politcally important door for sociological research.

JB: Associate Professor of Health Management and Policy, School of Public Health; Research Associate Professor in the Institute of Gerontology, School of Medicine; Adjunct Associate Professor of Organizational Studies, College of Literature, Science and Arts, University of MichiganSL: Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, University of MichiganMZ: Professor (Emeritus) Sociology, Social Work and Management, University of Michigan. He has authored or edited twenty-one books, and more than seventy articles. Among other honors, he is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.