Professionelles Erwartungsmanagement

No other occupation became idealized and criticized as much as the professional doctor. Not at least by the social sciences. The book follows the paths of this fascination and investigates its genesis and social function.
How the social figure of the doctor emerges and changes is reconstructed by a semantic-analysis of doctors’ self-descriptions and sociologies’ view on doctors. Both kinds of material mirror social expectations towards the doctor and the very close interdependencies between the two allow to draw conclusions about the function of this social figure. The changes in the narratives show that through the social figure of the doctor medicine puts itself into relation to a constantly changing society. It allows medicine to always adapt to and concomitantly shape social expectations. Only such a socially powerful figure as the professional doctor and the mechanism of professional expectation-managment can explain the highly improbable practise of modern healthcare.