Search results

The accounting, medical, and legal professions share characteristics common to peer-reviewed professions. These professions also share challenges to professionalism. All three have been criticized for declining professionalism and for choosing commercial success over serving the public interest. Although the medical and legal professions have taken steps to promote a higher level of professional conduct by their members, the accounting profession has not launched initiatives to promote professionalism.

We discuss the initiatives instigated by the legal and medical professions using the five elements of professionalism framework (Hamilton, 2008a). Specifically, the framework highlights the importance of growth in personal conscience, demands compliance with the ethics of duty, inspires realization of aspirational goals, requires accountability of peer professionals, and emphasizes devotion to serving the public good. We recommend that members of the accounting profession use the five elements of professionalism framework to define, demonstrate, and assess professionalism. We conclude that promoting professionalism is a means for restoring professional identity for individual accountants as well as a means for fulfilling the accounting profession's contract with society.

The medicalization thesis derives from a classic theme in the field of medical sociology. It addresses the broader issue of the power of medicine – as a culture and as a profession – to define and regulate social behavior. This issue was introduced into sociology 50 years ago by Talcott Parsons (1951) who suggested that medicine was a social institution that regulated the kind of deviance for which the individual was not held morally responsible and for which a medical diagnosis could be found. The agent of social control was the medical profession, an institutionalized structure in society that had been given the mandate to restore the health of the sick so that they could resume their expected role obligations. Inherent in this view of medicine was the functionalist perspective on the workings of society: the basic function of medicine was to maintain the established division of labor, a state that guaranteed the optimum working of society. For 20 years, the Parsonian interpretation of how medicine worked – including sick-role theory and the theory of the profession of medicine – dominated the bourgeoning field of medical sociology.

To shed light on how gender norms are reproduced in medical training and practice through an exploration of representations of the problem of “work–life balance.” Women physicians and women physician-researchers (WPs/WPRs) in Canada and in the United States experience social and health inequities when compared to their men colleagues. Despite current medical school acceptance parity, upon entering the medical workforce, women work harder than men to succeed within the historically male-dominated structures and value system of the medical profession.

We performed a critical discourse analysis of articles retrieved from academic databases and leading Anglo-American journals that discussed “work–life balance,” to investigate how the discourse contributed to, or challenged, the reproduction of gender norms in medicine.

While the medical literature acknowledges that the social and health inequities experienced by WP/WPR result from discriminatory norms and practices, it neglects to challenge built-in gendered inequities in benchmarks for success in the profession. Instead, proposed solutions require that WP/WPR themselves learn to cope and make better lifestyle choices, including downloading domestic responsibilities on socially disadvantaged – racialized and poor – women. Authors’ gender appears to make no difference.

Our search was limited to the Anglo-American literature, often retrieved articles inaccessible via our university library, excluded informal venues (e.g., blogs), and did not include cases of same-sex couples or interviews of WP/WPR. All these may have challenged components of our argument by revealing more nuanced debates, occurring under different political, cultural, and economic contexts.

While individual choices of WP/WPR are important to the protagonists, to successfully address the very real problem of work–life balance experienced by WP/WPR, patriarchal norms should be challenged, failure to comply with these norms should be rejected as explanations for work–life balance challenges, and norms themselves should become the focus of analysis and intervention.

The medical language used by physicians of both genders normalizes gendered inequities, favoring the success of medical men over women, and reproducing the professional and personal disadvantages experienced by the latter, further burdening socially disadvantaged women.

In this introductory chapter, I discuss the rationale for this edited collection and the contribution it can make to advancing knowledge of gender inequalities and promoting social justice in the medical profession and medical education. I provide a short overview of and critique of popular debates in the medical community in the United Kingdom and I also discuss briefly research about women’s careers in the United Kingdom and globally. The introductory chapter provides a description of each chapter and its contribution to scholarship about gender, careers and inequalities in Medicine/Medical Education.

This chapter explores the inequalities and restrictions faced by women as they entered the medical profession in the United Kingdom. A case study in the first hospital in the United Kingdom to be founded and run by women, the Edinburgh Hospital for Women and Children, it demonstrates the importance of history for understanding women doctor’s early career choices and opportunities. The chapter begins with an outline of nineteenth-century notions of feminine propriety. It considers how middle-class women sought to subvert these restrictions and gain an active role in public life, and explores how this impacted upon arguments in favour of medical women. It reveals the significance of the changing nature of medical knowledge in this period, and considers how this contributed to the emergence of two distinct specialisms, both of which became the preserve of women doctors: maternal welfare schemes in the 1900s, and the treatment of VD in the inter-war period. The chapter concludes with its contribution to this edited collection.

Medicalization is the increasing social control of the everyday by medical experts. It is a key concept in the sociology of health and illness because it sees medicine as not merely a scientific endeavor, but a social one as well. Medicalization is a “process whereby more and more of everyday life has come under medical dominion, influence, and supervision” (Zola, 1983, p. 295); previously these areas of everyday life were viewed in religious or moral terms (Conrad & Schneider, 1980; Weeks, 2003). More specifically, medicalization is the process of “defining a problem in medical terms, using medical language to describe a problem, adopting a medical framework to understand a problem, or using a medical intervention to ‘treat’ it” (Conrad, 1992, p. 211). Sociologists have used this concept to describe the shift in the site of decision-making and knowledge about health from the lay public to the medical profession.

Women remain under-represented in leadership positions in both clinical medicine and medical education, despite a rapid increase in the proportion of women in the medical profession. This chapter explores potential reasons for this under-representation and how it can be ameliorated, drawing on a range of international literatures, theories and practices. We consider both the ‘demand’ for and ‘supply’ of women as leaders, by examining: how evolving theories of leadership help to explain women’s’ leadership roles and opportunities, how employment patterns theory and gender schemas help to explain women’s career choices, how women aspiring to leadership can be affected by the ‘glass ceiling’ and the ‘glass cliff’ and the importance of professional development and mentoring initiatives. We conclude that high-level national strategies will need to be reinforced by real shifts in culture and structures before women and men are equally valued for their leadership and followership contributions in medicine and medical education.

With impeccable timing, literally just before the so-called dot.com boom went completely bust, the Australian Journal of Professional and Applied Ethics (July, 1999) dedicated a special issue to the topic of “computer ethics”. The lead article in that issue was by the pioneering American computer ethicist, Terrell Ward Bynum, who edited one of the first books in the field of computer ethics (Bynum, 1985).

This chapter draws upon the sociological concept of rationalization to explore the role and practice of sports medicine. It highlights attempts by the profession to create a rationalized model of health care for sports participants – particularly those involved in high-performance sports settings and the enabling and constraining elements of its enactment.

The chapter explains how changes in the organization of sports medicine have dovetailed with the increasing rationalization of sport which has been significant in enacting changes in sports medicine that are aligned with a more rationalized model of care.

Key findings from the literature highlight the difficulties of implementing rationalized health care policy into practice. Specifically, the chapter examines macro-organizational changes to the structure of sports medicine and the extent to which sports medicine represents a rationalized model of health care by virtue of micro-organizational constraints.

While the discussion draws upon a breadth of research by sociologists of sport who have examined sports medicine practices, the chapter draws heavily on the UK model of sports medicine care in high-performance sport and thus the conclusions may not be wholly transferable to non-UK and non-sports contexts.