Health Technology And Society

This book celebrates and captures examples of the excellent scholarship that Palgrave’s Health, Technology, and Society Series has published since 2006, and reflects on how the field has developed over this time. As a collection of readings drawn from twenty-two books, it is organized around five themes: Innovation, Responsibility, Locus of Care, Knowledge Production, and Regulation and Governance. Structured in this way, the book gives the reader a concise but nonetheless rich guide to the core issues and debates within the field. Complementing these narratives, the original authors have provided new reflection pieces on their texts and on their current work. This then is a book which in part looks back but also looks forward to emerging issues at the intersection of health, technology, and society. It uniquely encompasses and presents a range of expertise in a novel way that is both timely and accessible for students and others new to the field.

Examines a range of current innovative health technologies, exploring how far they change the boundaries between the body, health, technology relationship, and assessing the contribution a critical social science can make towards our understanding of this shift.

From bandage to the bioreactor, this book looks at five different device technologies from inception to healthcare practice, drawing on medical sociology, science and technology studies and political science. It examines 'evidence', regulation and governance processes, and diverse stakeholders in innovating the technologies that shape health care.

The first detailed and comprehensive analysis of the implications of new health technologies for society, the delivery of health care, and the very meaning of health itself. It is based on new, critical social science research integrated according to core themes, making it accessible and engaging to both students and researchers.

Winner of the British Sociological Association Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize, 2012. This book traces the changes in healthcare implicated in telecare technologies: information and communication technologies that enable care at a distance. What happens when healthcare moves from physical to virtual encounters between healthcare professionals and patients? What are the consequences for patients when they are expected to do things that used to be done by healthcare professionals? What actually happens when homes become electronically wired to healthcare organizations? These are urgent questions that are, however, largely absent in dominant discourses on telecare. Drawing on insights from science, technology, and human geography, this work opens up novel accounts of the adoption and use of new technologies in healthcare. Nelly Oudshoorn shows how telecare technologies participate in redefining the responsibilities and identities of patients and healthcare professionals, introducing a new category of healthcare workers, and changing the kinds of care and spaces where healthcare is situated. This book intervenes critically into discourses that celebrate the independence of place and time by showing how places and physical contacts still matter in care at a distance.

An anthology of writings by thinkers ranging from Freeman Dyson to Bruno Latour that focuses on the interconnections of technology, society, and values and how these may affect the future. Technological change does not happen in a vacuum; decisions about which technologies to develop, fund, market, and use engage ideas about values as well as calculations of costs and benefits. This anthology focuses on the interconnections of technology, society, and values. It offers writings by authorities as varied as Freeman Dyson, Laurence Lessig, Bruno Latour, and Judy Wajcman that will introduce readers to recent thinking about technology and provide them with conceptual tools, a theoretical framework, and knowledge to help understand how technology shapes society and how society shapes technology. It offers readers a new perspective on such current issues as globalization, the balance between security and privacy, environmental justice, and poverty in the developing world. The careful ordering of the selections and the editors' introductions give Technology and Society a coherence and flow that is unusual in anthologies. The book is suitable for use in undergraduate courses in STS and other disciplines. The selections begin with predictions of the future that range from forecasts of technological utopia to cautionary tales. These are followed by writings that explore the complexity of sociotechnical systems, presenting a picture of how technology and society work in step, shaping and being shaped by one another. Finally, the book goes back to considerations of the future, discussing twenty-first-century challenges that include nanotechnology, the role of citizens in technological decisions, and the technologies of human enhancement.

This thoughtful and engaging text challenges the widely held notion of science as somehow outside of society, and the idea that technology proceeds automatically down a singular and inevitable path. Through specific case studies involving contemporary debates, this book shows that science and technology are fundamentally part of society and are shaped by it. Draws on concepts from political sociology, organizational analysis, and contemporary social theory. Avoids dense theoretical debate. Includes case studies and concluding chapter summaries for students and scholars.

Navigating Digital Health Landscapes explores how users navigate the internet when searching for health information. It is the first book to conceptualise the internet as a landscape and the ways in which people navigate this digital world, including the complex entanglements between on and offline domains. It does so through a range of disciplinary perspectives from expert contributors across STS (science and technology studies), social anthropology, biomedicine, ethics and law, linguistics, social policy and computer scientists working in more technical aspects of tracking and visualising data and information on the internet. The book provides a unique and valuable contribution for those wishing to understand how digital technologies are affecting the design, implementation and use of digital systems to manage health information in different contexts.