Contenu du sommaire : Prescription médicale

This article shows that in a context of “bed shortages”, which impose the rapid discharge of patients from psychiatric hospitals, medication compliance is largely obtained through medical injunction. In contrast, the care of patients outside the hospital depends massively on the injection of slow-release medicines which have a chemical action on the body for several weeks. Finally, by looking at the taking of medicines, which falls somewhere between constraint and consent, we can gain a better understanding of the contemporary reconfigurations of power, and their impacts, within psychiatric care.

This article analyses the trajectory of Di-Antalvic, a pain killer that was massively prescribed by general practitioners during the 2000's. Its success is atypical because it was driven by a dominated segment of the medical profession, namely general medicine. The article shows how the prescription of this drug became widespread at a national level, through pressure being put on the French Medical Drugs Agency, but without the support of the pharmaceutical industry, possibly even in opposition to it. The text also explains why this prescriptive standard never came to predominate at a European scale and how the drug was in fact ultimately withdrawn from the market in 2011.

At the heart of this article lies the material manifestation of the medical prescription. In Germany, the prescription takes the form of an electronically readable and traceable document. By examining its somewhat non-linear evolution over the course of the last century, the article proposes an alternative interpretation to the usual narratives of political and technological modernizations within the realm of healthcare. It underlines the advantages offered by an approach based on “paper technologies” for the study of health care systems.

This article explores the impacts of social displacement within professional football on footballers' friendship sociability. Based on an ethnographic study, it shows the extent to which this sociability is concentrated around the club which employs the players, a fact that contributes to reinforcing the all-enveloping dimension of the footballing profession. Following this initial observation, it seeks to highlight the logics of differentiation that operate between players by showing how the people with whom they socialize, and also the norms that are at the core of these friendship sociabilities, can be strongly differentiated.

This article analyses the symbolic economy of autochthony capital, i.e. the struggles to define the legitimate forms of belonging to a space of mutual acquaintance. By looking at a fair in a periurban village, it traces the revalorisation of commercial activity as a symbol of the life of the territory – in the face of the marginalisation of agricultural networks – and the differential appropriation of the profits of autochthony by traders. By linking together the capital of autochthony and the space of mutual acquaintance, it thus seeks to reconstruct the differential valorisation of this capital according to the socio-spatial configurations and to highlight small differences in allocation beyond the opposition between outsiders and established.

The drop in permanent funding for research in the social sciences increases the influence of commissioning bodies within the field. How do these commissions influence the conditions under which a study is undertaken, the analysis of data and the dissemination of results ? Based on studies concerning a project to promote musical democratisation, we first objectivise the imbalances in the relationships with the representatives of the commissioning institution and we then show how we nonetheless manage to create a degree of room for manœuvre by building on the internal tensions within the set-up.