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This chapter explores the relationship between sociologists and their fields. This relation is strongly shaped by a dual fear that runs through the history of sociology: that of either losing epistemic distance and sociological identity trough over-involvement, or that of insufficient engagement through over-detachment from issues of concern. This dual fear dates back to positions of Weber and Marx and regularly resurfaces through e.g. discussions on Public Sociology. After reviewing such debates, this chapter introduces the emerging scholarly approach of situated intervention as an alternative way of relating sociologists and their fields. Drawing on the work of Ian Hacking on the importance of interlocking representing and intervening in the sciences, on the position proposed by Howard Becker of combining attachment with avoiding sentimentality, and on discussions within Science and Technology Studies on scholarly involvement, intervention is not presented as a matter of engagement but rather as an approach to producing sociological knowledge and normativity. Experiments with the organization of care thereby reclaim the notion of intervention from static understandings of objectivity and ethics.

This chapter explores the consequences of situated standardization for the relation between standardization and patient-centeredness. In the medical sociological literature, ‘standardization’ and ‘patient-centered care’ have been positioned as perfect conceptual opposites. This chapter explore the specificities of this opposition, their limitations, and in which sense a reconceptualization of both concepts could lead to their pragmatic commensurability. Drawing empirically upon the development of patient-centered care pathways, and particularly on the disconcerting moments within empirical instances of biomedicalized and patient-centered care, situated standardization proves helpful for redefining patient-centeredness from a change in professional attitude toward ‘wholeness’, or a procedural focus on patient participation, to a material and organizational characteristic. This proves particularly important because other definitions of patient-centeredness can allow doctors to exert unprecedented power over their patients. By putting center stage the issues patients, care professionals and organizations face, care can be made patient-centered in more substantial, contestable and located ways.

Since the 19th century, we have come to think of disease in terms of specific entities--entities defined and legitimated in terms of characteristic somatic mechanisms. Since the last third of that century, we have expanded would-be disease categories to include an ever-broader variety of emotional pain, idiosyncrasy, and culturally unsettling behaviors. Psychiatry has been the residuary legatee of these developments, developments that have always been contested at the ever-shifting boundary between disease and deviance, feeling and symptom, the random and the determined, the stigmatized and the value-free. Even in our era of reductionist hopes, psychopharmaceutical practice, and corporate strategies, the legitimacy of many putative disease categories will remain contested. The use of the specific disease entity model will always be a reductionist means to achieve necessarily holistic ends, both in terms of cultural norms and the needs of suffering individuals. Bureaucratic rigidities and stakeholder conflicts structure and intensify such boundary conflicts, as do the interests and activism of an interested lay public.