This important text introduces students to both feminism and other social and political theories via an examination of the inter-relationship between different feminist positions and key contemporary debates. The book takes each debate in turn, outlines the main themes, discusses different feminist responses and evaluates the implications for real-life political and social issues. This user-friendly structure effectively redraws the map of contemporary feminist thought, offering a fresh and succinct summary of an extensive range of material and graphically demonstrating the ongoing relevance and value of a feminist perspective.

Health and social care decisions, and how they impact a family, are often viewed from the perspective of the individual family member making them-for example, the role of the parent in surrogacy questions, the care of the elderly, or decisions that involve fetuses or organ donations. What About the Family? represents a concerted, collaborative effort to depart from this practice-it rather shows that the family unit as a whole is intrinsic and inseparable from patient's ethical decisions. This deeper level of thinking about families and health care poses an entirely new set of difficult questions. Which family members are relevant in influencing a patient? What is a family, in the first place? What duties does a family have to its own members? What makes an ethics of families distinctive from health care ethics, an ethic of care or feminist ethics is that it theorizes relationships characterized by ongoing intimacy and partiality among people who are not interchangeable, and remains centered on the practices of responsibility arising from these relationships. What About the Family? edited by bioethicists Hilde Lindemann, Marian Verkerk, and Janice McLaughlin, represents an interdisciplinary effort, drawing, among other resources, on its authors' backgrounds in sociology, nursing, philosophy, bioethics, and the medical sciences. Contributors begin from the assumption that any ethical examination of the significance of family ties to health and social care will benefit from a dialogue with the debates about family occuring in these other disciplinary areas, and examine why families matter, how families are recognized, how families negotiate responsibilities, how families can participate in treatment decision making, and how justice operates in families.

A crucial contemporary dynamic around children and young people in the Global North is the multiple ways that have emerged to monitor their development, behaviour and character. In particular disabled children or children with unusual developmental patterns can find themselves surrounded by multiple practices through which they are examined. This rich book draws on a wide range of qualitative research to look at how disabled children have been cared for, treated and categorised. Narrative and longitudinal interviews with children and their families, along with stories and images they have produced and notes from observations of different spaces in their lives - medical consultation rooms, cafes and leisure centres, homes, classrooms and playgrounds amongst others - all make a contribution. Bringing this wealth of empirical data together with conceptual ideas from disability studies, sociology of the body, childhood studies, symbolic interactionism and feminist critical theory, the authors explore the multiple ways in which monitoring occurs within childhood disability and its social effects. Their discussion includes examining the dynamics of differentiation via medicine, social interaction, and embodiment and the multiple actors - including children and young people themselves - involved. The book also investigates the practices that differentiate children into different categories and what this means for notions of normality, integration, belonging and citizenship. Scrutinising the multiple forms of monitoring around disabled children and the consequences they generate for how we think about childhood and what is 'normal', this volume sits at the intersection of disability studies and childhood studies.

A crucial contemporary dynamic around children and young people in the Global North is the multiple ways that have emerged to monitor their development, behaviour and character. In particular disabled children or children with unusual developmental patterns can find themselves surrounded by multiple practices through which they are examined. This rich book draws on a wide range of qualitative research to look at how disabled children have been cared for, treated and categorised. Narrative and longitudinal interviews with children and their families, along with stories and images they have produced and notes from observations of different spaces in their lives - medical consultation rooms, cafes and leisure centres, homes, classrooms and playgrounds amongst others - all make a contribution. Bringing this wealth of empirical data together with conceptual ideas from disability studies, sociology of the body, childhood studies, symbolic interactionism and feminist critical theory, the authors explore the multiple ways in which monitoring occurs within childhood disability and its social effects. Their discussion includes examining the dynamics of differentiation via medicine, social interaction, and embodiment and the multiple actors - including children and young people themselves - involved. The book also investigates the practices that differentiate children into different categories and what this means for notions of normality, integration, belonging and citizenship. Scrutinising the multiple forms of monitoring around disabled children and the consequences they generate for how we think about childhood and what is 'normal', this volume sits at the intersection of disability studies and childhood studies.

How does new information technology become part of the fabric of organisational life? Drawing on insights from social studies of technology, gender studies and the sociology of consumption, Valuing Technology opens up new directions in the analysis of sociotechnical change within organisations. Based on a major research project focused upon the introduction of management of information systems in health, higher education and retailing, I explores the active role of end-users in innovation.
This book argues that it is through the, often difficult, engagement between users and technology that new computer systems come to gain value within organisations. Key themes developed through analysis of case studies include:
*the valuing of technology via the on-going construction of needs, uses and utilities
*occupational identities, organisational inequalities and technological change
*the gendering of technological and organisational change
*interpretive flexibility and the 'stabilisation' of technological systems and their incorporation into the lives of people in organisations.
A stimulating blend of the theoretical and substantive, this book demands a radical redefinition of 'technology acquisition'. It's highly original approach makes Valuing Technology essential reading for students, lecturers and researchers within the fields of organisation studies and the sociology of technology.