Situated Intervention: Sociological Experiments in Health Care

248 Pages·2015·10.305 MB·English

by  Teun Zuiderent-Jerak

Situated Intervention
Inside Technology
edited by Wiebe E. Bijker, W. Bernard Carlson, and Trevor Pinch
A list of the series appears at the back of the book.
Situated Intervention
Sociological Experiments in Health Care
Teun Zuiderent-Jerak
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
© 2015 Massachusetts institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any
electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or informa-
tion storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
MIT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for business or
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Set in Stone by the MIT Press. Printed and bound in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Zuiderent-Jerak, Teun, author.
Situated intervention : sociological experiments in health care / Teun Zuiderent-
Jerak.
p. cm.—(Inside technology)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-262-02938-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)
I. Title. II. Series: Inside technology.
[DNLM: 1. Delivery of Health Care. 2. Sociology. 3. Quality of Health Care. W 84.1]
RA418
362.1—dc23
2015001897
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
for with Sonja

Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Exploring Intervention in the Social Sciences 1
1 The Stuff of Interventions: Technologies of Compliance in Hemophilia
Care 39
2 Situated Standardization in Hematology and Oncology Care 61
3 Situated Standardization and Patient-Centered Care 95
4 The Qualities of Competition: Reconfiguring Health Care Markets 117
5 Sociological Reconfigurations of Patient Safety: Situated Intervention
as Multiple Ontologies 155
Conclusion: Situated Intervention and the Ethics of Specificity 177
Notes 193
References 203
Index 229
Series List 233

Acknowledgments
Every scholarly work with one name on the cover performs the myth of
single-authored scholarship. Although that myth may currently be well
worth defending, acknowledgments are not the place to do so. If all books
are networks, with relations and connections spreading in every direction,
this is even more so for a book on situated intervention. Moreover, writ-
ing this book spanned more years than I wish to recall. That, too, makes it
impossible to acknowledge all who contributed to its fruition. Nonetheless,
I will attempt—and fail—to do so here.
I start with the care professionals, hospital administrators, policy mak-
ers, and patients who were much more than mere “research subjects.”
Given our inspiring mix of interests, loyalties, and productive betrayals, I’m
particularly sorry that I cannot acknowledge some of the most important
contributors by name, having promised them anonymity. I can only hope
that all those who were involved in the research that led to chapters 1–3
will feel acknowledged through the small or large changes in their work-
ing lives or in their patients’ lives that our shared involvement may have
brought about. That would be the least I should hope for, given all the
changes our interaction has enabled me to experience in my scholarly life.
Fortunately, the long-standing collaboration with the Atrium Medi-
cal Center is exempt from anonymity. I thank everyone there, and espe-
cially Nico van Weert, for being committed to quality improvement and to
exploring in practice what that actually entails. Equally important for the
research that led to chapter 4 was the collaboration with those involved in
the Better Faster initiative—especially Marc Rouppe van der Voort, who is
simply amazing at handling the logistics of health care, and Marije Stoffer,
who turned individuals into a team.
There are many others without whom the book would never have been
completed, but only one without whom it would not even have been
started. Marc Berg crucially influenced my thinking about the materiality