T: Health

Network T: Health

The health of individuals and communities is produced in many ways by socioeconomic structures and processes. This interdisciplinary network examines health from the perspective of socioeconomics, with particular attention to issues around inequality and inequity that shape the ability of patients to access healthcare and medicines. Our network focuses on four interrelated substantive and theoretical areas:

1. Political Economy, Socioeconomics, and the Production of Health: Examining the economic sociology and political economy of medicine, such as state- or firm-led development of new drugs, social entrepreneurial strategies, innovations and/or policies supporting positive health outcomes.
2. Health Equality and Equity: Investigating the problématiques of health, including such structural and fundamental causes of poor health as socioeconomic status in shaping health disparities and outcomes; and potential private and/or public sector solutions.
3. Organizing and the Organization of Health: Analyzing markets for drugs, medicines, and medical devices, patient-physician relationships and health intermediaries, management of healthcare systems, and role of patient activists, among others.
4. Pricing and Valuation of Health: Exploring issues around values and valuation in health and health products (e.g., pharmaceuticals and treatments), quality of care, pricing of health products, and the contested politics of medical expertise.

Larry Au

Larry Au is an Assistant Professor for the Sociology Department at The City College of New York’s Colin Powell School for Global and Civic Leadership. His research examines the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in the production of biomedical knowledge and asks how clinicians and scientists can better serve their patients and the public. Part of this work examines the globalization of precision medicine—or the use of genomics and other forms of big data to improve diagnosis and treatment—as a policy idea and scientific project, focusing primarily on its rise in China. Another part of this research looks at the politics of expertise around Long Covid, in particular, the experience of patients as they navigate uncertainties around their condition. His work has been published in Sociological Forum, Qualitative Sociology, Social Science & Medicine, SSM-Qualitative Research in Health, Science Technology & Human Values, Public Understanding of Science, and other venues. This research has been supported by the Luce/ACLS Program in China Studies, the Social Science Research Council, and other funders.

Kathryn Ibata-Arens

Kathryn Ibata-Arens is Vincent de Paul Professor of Political Economy, DePaul University. A scholar of innovation and entrepreneurship, science and technology policy, and economic development, her award-winning 2021 book Pandemic Medicine: Why the Global Innovation System is Broken and How We Can Fix It analyzes international competition in new drug discovery and access to essential medicines. Ibata-Arens is also researching the moral economy of patents over living matter, particularly that taken from indigenous communities. Her 2019 book Beyond Technonationalism: Biomedical Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Asia uses the lens of venture start-up firms in China, India, Japan, and Singapore, finding a new “networked techno-nationalism” guiding national policy and firm-level strategy supporting competitive growth in frontier technologies. In her journal articles, blogs, policy briefings, podcasts, and books, Ibata-Arens employs such methods as historical-institutional, policy and social network analysis, and original fieldwork-based case studies, contextualized within global politics and markets.

Etienne Nouguez

Etienne Nouguez is a CNRS researcher at the Center for the Sociology of Organizations (CNRS – Sciences Po Paris). At the crossroads of economic sociology and health sociology, his research focuses on health markets. These markets are approached as complex social organizations combining regulatory agencies, experts, pharmaceutical companies, health professionals and consumers. But they are also analyzed as spaces for valuation in which plural and potentially contradictory conceptions of the value of these products are articulated. After a PhD dissertation on the French markets for generic medicines, he studied the politics of medicines prices setting in France. His current research focuses on how European markets are formed for boundary products between food and drugs, with a particular focus on probiotics. He is also involved in a collective research  on the management of the Covid-19 pandemic by local public health authorities and infrastructures. Combining qualitative and quantitative approaches, these researches shed light on the different processes linking health, political and market values.

Wan-Zi Lu

Wan-Zi Lu is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Polonsky Academy for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. Her book project, “The Many Hands of the Healthcare State,” examines bodily donation at the nexus of the institutionalization of care, political culture, and moralized markets. To understand why shared cultural norms have produced different policies and practices of organ donation, she compares the regulatory frameworks and policy outcomes of bodily giving in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Utilizing comparative historical analysis, her research illuminates that institutional and organizational apparatuses affect policy delivery, define the boundaries of markets, and shape medical outcomes. Her works received the 2022 Theda Skocpol Best Dissertation Award in the section on comparative-historical sociology and the 2021 Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Award in the section on altruism, morality, and social solidarity of the American Sociological Association. She has published in Incentives and Disincentives for Organ Donation, Sociology of Development, the Revue française de sociologie, and other venues.