http://hdl.handle.net/1842/1806 2013-05-20T13:55:28Z 2013-05-20T13:55:28Z Rangel De Almeida, Joao Jose http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6464 2012-09-26T15:03:41Z 2012-06-29T00:00:00Z

Title: 1851 International Sanitary Conference and the construction of an international sphere of public health Authors: Rangel De Almeida, Joao Jose Abstract: Focusing on the 1851 International Sanitary Conference, this dissertation analyses an important episode in the international regulation of health, trade, passengers, and cargo in a period of epidemic crisis. It argues that a group of diplomats and physicians appointed to represent 12 European nations instituted a new international forum that extended – and occasionally rivalled – national and local agencies for epidemic governance. Together, delegates endeavoured to establish a common sanitary policy in Europe and in the Orient. By creating shared surveillance and judicial mechanisms – while standardising definitions and practices – delegates aimed to engineer the flow of people, vessels, cargo, and diseases in the Mediterranean region. As a transnational forum, the Conference was a platform where doctors and diplomats reinterpreted models of public health and sanitary administration while creating institutions that challenged conventional concepts of borders, national policy, and state sovereignty. As a multinational event, the Conference marked the unprecedented transition from local, national and, bilateral public health policies into a coherent transnational project for the governance of epidemics. The dissertation is based on extensive research conducted in hitherto largely unexplored medical, diplomatic, and national collections in Britain, France, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and the United States of America. Sources ranging from diplomatic correspondence to medical publications and personal diaries, tie together multiple national and professional perspectives while untangling a diversity of personal and state agendas that fundamentally shaped the foundation of international public health mechanisms and contributed towards the crystallisation of medical concepts. Chapter one demonstrates how economic and political concerns about the impact of quarantine on international trade led to calls for international regulation and the standardization of quarantine practices in the Mediterranean region. Drawing on medical reports, pamphlets and diplomatic correspondence, the chapter exposes the multitude of quarantine practices in the Mediterranean region and a growing international demand for prophylactic reform. These exchanges, it is shown, culminated with the organization of the 1851 International Sanitary Conference in Paris. Chapter two argues that the Conference challenged previous diplomatic and medical protocols by including two professional groups in the process of regulating international public health. The lack of precedent allowed diplomatic and medical delegates to establish new rules for the conduct of the conference, which gave them a relatively high level of autonomy from the states they represented. Chapter three focuses on the problems of constructing a shared aetiological classification and regulating quarantine practices. It shows that, although doctors gained progressive control over the Conference, ultimately diplomatic agendas shaped the final outcome. In addition, it demonstrates that, rather than defending the elimination of quarantines, liberal states supported the continuation of quarantine practice in the Mediterranean; albeit that they managed to severely limit its operation in practice. Finally, chapter four examines how European and Oriental sanitary institutions were uniformly redesigned and new international judicial mechanisms created. These measures variously affected the sovereignty of the participating states by limiting their independent capacity to set national epidemic policies. However, the chapter argues that these negotiations took the shape of sovereignty bargains: by loosening control over specific elements of their sovereignty, states managed to advance their political, economic and sanitary agendas. By looking at the International Sanitary Conference of 1851, this dissertation shows how the foundations of international public health had consequences not only for the control of epidemic diseases and the circulation of goods and people in the Mediterranean region, but also for the authority and status of the nation states. By doing so, it reveals that international public health governance resulted from the amalgamation of a particular configuration of expert and diplomatic struggles and compromises. Moreover, the dissertation shifts the traditional local and national focus in the history of medicine to a wider and international context where local and national traditions struggled to produce coherent discourses and practices.

2012-06-29T00:00:00Z Grimm, Christine Franziska http://hdl.handle.net/1842/5667 2013-04-09T15:14:07Z 2009-11-26T00:00:00Z

Title: Inside a secret software lab: an ethnographic study of a global software package producer Authors: Grimm, Christine Franziska Abstract: This is an ethnographic study of the creation of a particular type of standard enterprise software package: Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, which support wide-ranging organisational functions within large and medium sized enterprises. Drawing upon the Social Shaping of Technology perspective and recent related attempts to theorise the Biography of Artefacts, this thesis addresses the under-researched area of ERP system development and ERP system support. In providing a system vendor’s viewpoint, it seeks to overcome current shortcomings in social research, notably from Information Systems and Organisational Studies, which focus almost exclusively on a user organisation perspective. Mostly concentrating on the moment of implementation, existing studies do not help us to better understand the software producer’s viewpoint or to find explanations as to how ERP systems are produced and supported in such a way that they can meet the specific requirements of their highly diverse users (the current market leader SAP had over 12 million users (2008)). Overall, we have very limited understanding of what happens within software package laboratories and how such organisations organise their relationship with their wide and diverse user base throughout the different phases of the product life cycle. Addressing this gap in the social study of software packages, this research offers an ethnographical insider’s perspective of the day-to-day working practices within one of the world’s leading ERP system providers, encompassing both its development and support functions. Based on rich ethnographic data, the study demonstrates first, how a supplier manages its relationship with its diverse user base during the moment when the system re-enters the vendor’s circle of responsibility through the software packages support channel. The sophisticated and mature mechanisms and policies are highlighted, which allow the vendor - not without challenges – to accommodate competing exigencies of its user base at this moment of product life cycle. Second, this research highlights how the software development phase is organised, by empirically describing and analysing from a social viewpoint, the software development process during a period of organisational change, in which the vendor reorganises itself in search for a new way to respond to the expectations of the market. Third, the account reveals unexpected communitarian behaviour amongst software developers at all levels, demonstrating the social character of programming, a feature which has not been adequately recognised by current studies in this area. Fourth, overall, this study highlights the need for a change of the current research agenda in social software package research towards a vendor organisation’s perspective, if we aim for a more complete understanding of the social aspects such type of technology.

2009-11-26T00:00:00Z Beynon-Jones, Siân M. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/4514 2013-04-09T15:08:45Z 2010-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Expertise and Scottish abortion practice: understanding healthcare professionals’ accounts Authors: Beynon-Jones, Siân M. Abstract: Current UK abortion law has been subjected to extensive feminist critique because of the relationships that it constructs between healthcare professionals (HCPs) and women with unwanted pregnancies. The law allows HCPs to opt out of abortion provision on the grounds of conscience, implying that it is not something which they have an automatic duty to provide to their patients. It also gives doctors the authority to decide whether an abortion can legally take place, thus suggesting that women’s reproductive decisions should be regulated by medical ‘experts’. However, little is known about how HCPs who are involved in twenty-first century UK abortion provision define their relationships with their patients in practice. My thesis makes an important empirical contribution by responding to this gap in the literature and exploring the subjectivities which these HCPs construct for themselves and their pregnant patients. I address this issue by analysing Scottish HCPs’ interview accounts of their involvement in (or conscientious objection to) abortion provision, using conceptual tools provided by Science and Technology Studies (STS) and feminist theory. I begin by utilising HCPs’ discussions of the practice of ‘conscientious objection’ as a means of exploring how they define the boundaries of their professional responsibilities for abortion provision. I then move on to address HCPs’ accounts of their interactions with women requesting abortion, and analyse how they define legitimate or ‘expert’ knowledge in this context. A key conclusion of the thesis is that HCPs do concede some authority to women with unwanted pregnancies; this is revealed by their reluctance to suggest that they have the right to prevent individual women from accessing abortion. At the same time, I argue that the legitimacy granted to pregnant women by HCPs is limited. My analysis reveals that, in constructing knowledge claims about the use of abortion, HCPs co-produce troubling definitions of femininity, socio-economic class, age and ethnicity. I develop a strong critique of this process, and highlight its potential implications for women’s experiences in the abortion clinic. However, I conclude that this situation cannot be addressed by simply attacking the practices of HCPs as individuals. Rather, it is necessary to understand and critique the limitations of the discursive context in which HCPs are working, because this context shapes the subjectivities available to pregnant women and HCPs.

2010-01-01T00:00:00Z Huang, Chih-Tung http://hdl.handle.net/1842/4480 2010-12-14T15:15:02Z 2010-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Shaping environmental “justices” Authors: Huang, Chih-Tung Abstract: This thesis investigates the concept of environmental justice (EJ) by tracing its origins, the process of its shaping and reshaping, and its adoption in Taiwan. EJ addresses the phenomenon of disproportionate distribution of environmental risks among social groups. As no one can actually “see” how risks are distributed, one has no choice but to rely on scientific (or other) techniques to visualise and then conceptualise these risks. After so doing, EJ has been turned into specific indicators to gauge EJ/injustice and the technical methods to measure it, even though the scope of these concerns is much broader and goes far beyond the technical. Using detailed historical exposition in tandem with interviews, this thesis seeks to demonstrate the processes that have led to the dominant constructions of environmental justice. The main argument of this thesis is that the phenomenon of EJ/injustice is a condensation of power relations/struggle, and the discourses that describe and the measures that gauge it are an expression of this struggle. Specifically, in this thesis I attempt to show that EJ is being constructed through the very process of debate among EJ supporters and with their challengers. Seen from this angle, this thesis shows that the conceptions of EJ differ and are mutable. To say that these conceptions change is not to deny that there is environmental injustice, but to recognise that the key characteristics can be categorised or explained differently. This research discloses that claims about EJ can be framed in much greater variety in terms of identity, difference, territory and governance. This thesis suggests that although understanding EJ through specific indicators and some sorts of techniques are necessary, a just society cannot be achieved through scientific research alone. The question of how much or what sort of data is sufficient to prove the existence of (in)justice is not a scientific one, but a social one. Our research could become much more meaningful if we recognise the specificity and limitations of the dominant approach and if the phenomenon of EJ/injustice is put in context. To achieve this, our intellectual endeavours should be properly conceived as being about a theory of endless political struggles over the issue, rather than simply about “discovering” EJ.

2010-01-01T00:00:00Z