| 1. |
- Arman, Rebecka, 1976, et al.
(författare)
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Inspecting life: professional vision in assisted reproduction technology
- 2019
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Ingår i: Cognition, Technology & Work. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1435-5558 .- 1435-5566. ; 21:3, s. 383-396
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- A growing scholarship in organization studies has examined how visual practices are informed by and situated within organizational settings and routines. Using the concept of professional vision, this is a study of the visual work of embryologists selecting human embryos in the field of assisted reproductive technologies. The term professional vision accentuates how embryologists cope with a number of tensions to accomplish disciplinary objectivity in their work. The study shows how visual practices are simultaneously individual and collective. While there are internationally enacted standard protocols guiding the routine-based work, these are continuously modified as novel clinical data is reported. Therefore, the embryologists’ inspection of life needs to actively accommodate both standard cases and deviations therefrom. This ultimately renders the professional vision of embryology something other than an “exact science” but rather a fluid, partly improvised, subjective, and at the same time highly specialized, routinized aesthetic practice. The study contributes to the emerging scholarship on visuality and professional vision in organizations, specifically to how standards are used in such practices. In addition, the study adds to the organizational research on assisted reproduction technology.
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| 2. |
- Arman, Rebecka, 1976, et al.
(författare)
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The sacred and the profane in life science: The case of assisted reproduction laboratories
- 2018
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Ingår i: Culture and Organization. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1475-9551 .- 1477-2760. ; 24:5, s. 348-364
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Reproductive medicine and assisted reproduction therapies have been developed over the last decades resulting in over five million babies. The handling of human reproductive materials and patients is based on the ability to combine health care work and techno-scientific expertise in both the clinic and the laboratory setting. This study of Swedish assisted reproductive technology clinics demonstrates that the active day-to-day manipulation of human reproductive materials enact both the ‘profane’, through treating the embryos as raw materials in standardized procedures enabling economies of scale, and the ‘sacred’ through enacting a separation, the potential to human life, the patients ordeals, and seriousness. The enactment of the profane and the sacred is mostly balanced but at certain points in the work procedures, their intersecting becomes particularly salient. Such points provide opportunities for the study of the sense making of professionals in organizational grey zones, during techno-scientific activities.
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| 3. |
- Styhre, Alexander, 1971, et al.
(författare)
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Institutionalizing Assisted Reproductive Technologies : The Role of Science, Professionalism, and Regulatory Control
- 2016
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Bok (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Reproductive medicine has been very successful at developing new therapies in recent years and people having difficulties conceiving have more options available to them than ever before. These developments have led to a new institutional landscape emerging and this innovative volume explores how health and social structures are being developed and reconfigured to take into account the increased use of assisted reproductive technologies, such as IVF treatments. Using Sweden as a central case study, it explores how the process of institutionalizing new assisted reproductive technologies includes regulatory agencies, ethical committees, political bodies and discourses, scientific communities, patient and activists groups, and entrepreneurial activities in the existing clinics and new entrants to the industry. It draws on new theoretical developments in institutional theory and outlines how health innovations are always embedded in social relations including ethical, political, and financial concerns. This book will be of interest to advanced students and academics in health management, science and technology studies, the sociology of health and illness and organisational theory.
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| 4. |
- Styhre, Alexander, 1971, et al.
(författare)
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Institutionalizing Assisted Reproductive Technologies
- 2016
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Bok (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Reproductive medicine has been very successful at developing new therapies in recent years and people having difficulties conceiving have more options available to them than ever before. These developments have led to a new institutional landscape emerging and this innovative volume explores how health and social structures are being developed and reconfigured to take into account the increased use of assisted reproductive technologies, such as IVF treatments.Using Sweden as a central case study, it explores how the process of institutionalizing new assisted reproductive technologies includes regulatory agencies, ethical committees, political bodies and discourses, scientific communities, patient and activists groups, and entrepreneurial activities in the existing clinics and new entrants to the industry. It draws on new theoretical developments in institutional theory and outlines how health innovations are always embedded in social relations including ethical, political, and financial concerns.This book will be of interest to advanced students and academics in health management, science and technology studies, the sociology of health and illness and organisational theory.
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| 5. |
- Styhre, Alexander, 1971, et al.
(författare)
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Reproductive Medicine and the Life Sciences in the Contemporary Economy - A Sociomaterial Perspective
- 2013
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Bok (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In Reproductive Medicine and the Life Sciences in the Contemporary Economy, Alexander Styhre and Rebecka Arman illuminate issues that have given rise to terms such as 'the bioeconomy' and 'the baby business'. The life sciences play an increasing role in providing services and commodities consumed by businesses and the public. Based on an in-depth study of clinics offering assisted fertilization in Sweden, this book is the first to examine the commercialization and commodification of know-how derived from the life sciences, from the point of view of organization theory. In the field of reproductive medicine there has been significant growth of both public and private clinical work. Clinics are places where individual interests and concerns and social and institutional arrangements intersect. With a front office where patients encounter various professional groups and a back office comprising the laboratories wherein human reproductive materials are handled and stored, they are more than just places in which medicine is applied in a clinical setting. Clinicians in this field actively influence policy-making and the regulatory frameworks that monitor and set the boundaries for their work. These are places where social and cultural interests and concerns are translated into policies and practice. The clinics are open social systems, responding to and influencing discussions. This book combines organization theory, sociological theory, gender theory, science and technology studies, and philosophy. It emphasises the critical importance of a sociomaterial perspective on organization, stressing how material and social resources are always of necessity folded into each other in day-to-day organizing.
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| 6. |
- Styhre, Alexander, 1971, et al.
(författare)
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The mutual constitution of legal environments and practices: The case of assistant reproduction technology
- 2015
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Ingår i: Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management. - 1746-5648. ; 10:2, s. 153-174
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Purpose – Institutional theorists treat law and regulations as external factors that is part of the organization’s environment. While institutional theory has been criticized for its inability to recognize the role of agents and to theorize agency, the growing literature on institutional work and institutional entrepreneurship, partially informed by and co-produced with practice theory, advances a more dynamic view of processes of institutionalization. In order to cope with legal and regulatory frameworks, constituting the legal environment of the organization, there are evidence of organizational responses in the form of bargaining, political negotiations, and decoupling of organizational units and processes. The purpose of this paper is to report how legal and regulatory frameworks both shape clinical practices while at the same time they are also informed by the activities and interests of professional communities and commercial clinics. Design/methodology/approach – This paper reports an empirical study of the Swedish-assisted conception industry and is based on a case study methodology including the use of interviews and formal documents and reports issues by governmental agencies. Findings – The empirical material demonstrates how scientists in reproductive medicine and clinicians regard the legal and regulatory framework as what ensures and reinforces the quality of the therapies. At the same time, they actively engage to modify the legal and regulatory framework in the case when they believe it would benefit the patients. The data reported presents one successful case of how PGD/PGS can be used to develop the efficacy of the therapy, and one unsuccessful case of regulatory change in the case of patient interest groups advocating a legalization of commercial gestational surrogacy. In the former case, scientific know-how and medicinal benefits served to “push” the new clinical practice, while in the latter case, the “demand-pull” of patient interest groups fails to get recognition in regulatory and policymaking quarters. Originality/value – The study contributes to the literature on agency in institutional theory (e.g. the emerging literature on institutional work) by emphasizing how legal and regulatory frameworks are in a constant process of being modified and negotiated in the face of novel technoscientific practices and social demands. More specifically, this process include many scientific, technological, economic, political and social relations and resources, making the legal environment of organizations what is the outcome from joint negotiations and agreements across organizational and professional boundaries.
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