The Hybrid Practitioner

The practice of architecture manifests in myriad forms and engagements. Overcoming false divides, this volume frames the fertile relationship between the cultural and scholarly production of academia and the process of designing and building in the material world. It proposes the concept of the hybrid practitioner, who bridges the gap between academia and practice by considering how different aspects of architectural practice, theory, and history intersect, opening up a fascinating array of possibilities for an active engagement with the present. The book explores different, interrelated roles for practicing architects and researchers, from the reproductive activities of teaching, consulting and publishing, through the reflective activities of drawing and writing, to the practice of building. The notion of the hybrid practitioner will appeal strongly to students, teachers and architectural practitioners as part of a multifaceted professional environment. By connecting academic interests with those of the professional realm, The Hybrid Practitioner addresses a wider readership embracing landscape design, art theory and aesthetics, European history, and the history and sociology of professions.

Revisiting Polish Abortion Law: Doctors and Institutions in a Restrictive Regime

This article examines the motivations of doctors operating in restrictive abortion regimes, and it takes Poland as a case study. It places in the foreground institutional and intra-professional factors that determine abortion healthcare, which to date have been accorded little attention. The article compares the impact that criminal, professional, and social sanctions have upon the provision of abortion services. In so doing, its purpose is to refocus debate in this area. It aims to move the emphasis away from legal and political factors, including the criminalisation of abortion, and to place it on medical agency. The Polish case study is examined to test out, in the context of a late-transitional polity, the sustainability of neo-institutionalist approaches to the study of law and organisations and the sociology of professions. The analysis is particularly important and urgent in light of the recent retrenchment of reproductive rights in Poland, and beyond.

Social and Professional Adaptation: From Conceptualization To Measurement

The article deals with the need to analyze social and professional adaptation under digital transformation in the labour market and the renewal of various professional activities resulted in developing new technology. The first part of the article considers the conceptual approaches to understanding the features of social and professional adaptation as an independent phenomenon, which have required the integration of conceptual developments in various branches of socio-humanitarian knowledge: sociology of adaptation, sociology of professions and social psychology. Based on the conceptual ideas presented, there defined social and professional adaptation, which is the inclusion of an actor in his profession through the formation of professional identity within the development of a professional role. This definition contains references to reconciling the internal needs of an actor in his professional self-realization and requiring the professional environment, which enunciates the interaction among the parties of adaptive relations in their professional sphere. Taking into account the adaptation situation, the features of social and professional adaptation are locally and globally analyzed and a clarification is made in the interpretation of «labour adaptation», which is similar in its content. The second part of the work enunciates the subjective and objective indicators of social and professional adaptation in the context of structural operationalization, which allows us to empirically study this phenomenon. The subjective indicators of social and professional adaptation are distinguished on the basis of an interpretive approach, according to which the effectiveness of adaptation should be studied through the self-assessment of an adaptor’s satisfaction with various aspects of his professional self-realization. The objective criteria of social and professional adaptation indentify the behavioural performance of an adaptation actor, which can acquire active and passive forms. The article introduces the general characteristics of methodological approaches to the analysis of social and professional adaptation in quantitative and qualitative research. The results are planned to be used in the future for a sociological study based on the developed conceptual and methodological framework.

Rupture and Continuity: Abortion, the Medical Profession, and the Transitional State—A Polish Case Study

Taking Poland as a case study, this article examines the sociological and historical-institutional factors that determine the relationship between the process of medical professionalisation and reproductive rights in transitional societies. Focusing on three periods in Polish history, (a) Partition era (1772–1918), (b) the Second Polish Republic (1918–1939), and (c) the post-war period (1945–1989), it identifies ruptures and continuities that have shaped the development of the Polish medical profession and its attitude towards abortion care today. Using insights from feminist historical institutionalism, abortion studies, and the sociology of professions, the article applies the concept of ‘dialectical transformations’ to explain institutional and policy reproduction and change over time. It shows how professional and legal institutions are often transferred from one systemic context to another by individuals or organisations whose positions move from opposition to dominance. Understanding such processes is especially important in light of the retrenchment of reproductive rights across the globe.

Introduction

The introduction sets out the methodological approach of this study, which combines book history and literary analysis with methods drawn from sociology, namely, network analysis, valuation studies, and the sociology of professions. It argues for a ‘pragmatics of poetry’ that takes seriously the more practical concerns that poets articulated in their verse and the inventive, and often conflicting, ways in which poets wrote about what it meant to write verse in the period. The introduction also acquaints readers unfamiliar with sixteenth-century Portuguese literature with the writers who will feature most prominently in this study. A concluding section considers how the figure of Orpheus transformed across a set of images and texts from the period concerned in order to illustrate the various issues discussed in the chapters that follow.

The ‘disenchantment’ of traditional acupuncturists in higher education

Efforts of traditional acupuncturists in the UK to regulate their practice and standardise their training, led, from the mid-1990s, to the launch of acupuncture undergraduate programmes within, or validated by, universities. It appeared as if by so doing acupuncturists were on course to align themselves with ‘scientifically plausible’, state-regulated, allied health professionals, a remarkable development considering the marginality of acupuncture practice outside East Asia, and its paradigmatic tensions with biomedicine. But was it really to be? Based on in-depth interviews with higher education acupuncture educators and an analysis of educational documents published by the leading professional body, we explore the way in which this paradigmatic tension is negotiated within a framework that is dominated by biomedicine. By critically revisiting sociology of professions and anti-colonial analysis, we examine an over two decades long journey of acupuncture educators in academic institutions in the UK. Based on this analysis, we point at some of the challenges that acupuncturists faced in higher education that may have restricted the academic legitimisation of acupuncture and that left them in a position of academic marginality and greater exposure to scrutiny, leading to their academic and mainstreaming ‘disillusionment’. At the same time, by positioning themselves as ‘professional academics’ within higher education institutions and demonstrating professionalism, acupuncture educators were able to demonstrate academic and professional ‘credibility’ and therefore distance themselves from the continuous scrutiny over their ‘biomedical fragility’.

Prosopography

This chapter discusses prosopography, which is defined as the investigation of the common background characteristics of a group of actors in history by means of a collective study of their lives. The etymology of the word suggests that prosopography is about describing or recording a person’s appearance or life, but prosopography differs from biography in that it analyses structured biographical data of groups of individuals that have something in common. Prosopography emerged primarily as a method for historical research. Outside of historical research, it is more commonly known as ‘group biography’ or ‘career-path analysis’. Prosopography has also been a key element of ‘field-based’ research on social groups and the sociology of professions, and is more of an approach than a method sui generis: it implies the systematic organization of data in such a way that connections and patterns that influence historical processes are revealed. The chapter then details the five stages of prosopography.