Abstract
Modern medicine represents what Karin Knorr Cetina (1999) has termed an ‘epistemic culture’. Medical institutions and practitioners produce and warrant medical expert knowledge and insights; hospitals function as expert organizations and much of the medical work is conducted through expert processes. Significant parts of medical work require collaboration between doctors and other professionals with different kinds of expertise. To borrow a formulation from Knorr Cetina (1999), many of the collaborative activities may be described in terms of different social and discursive ‘machines’ that are at work within medical expert systems. This chapter will deal with the collaborative production of clinical knowledge and ventures within a hospital context. A bottomup perspective will focus on the local and situational organization of problem-solving activities. In the following pages the hospital will be seen as an ‘expert organization’, consisting of different kinds of expert systems, working at different organizational levels.
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© 2007 Per Måseide
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Måseide, P. (2007). The Role of Signs and Representations in the Organization of Medical Work: X-rays in Medical Problem Solving. In: Iedema, R. (eds) The Discourse of Hospital Communication. Palgrave Studies in Professional and Organizational Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230595477_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230595477_10
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