"actor-network theory" or "actor network theory"

BACKGROUND: Introducing students to the "planetary health lenses" perspective is crucial. Comprehensive strategies for teaching this perspective are lacking, especially in the domains of "interconnection within nature (IWN)" and "systems thinking/complexity." There is also a scarcity of studies assessing medical students' opinions on planetary health and evaluating teaching strategies. OBJECTIVE: To understand Brazilian medical students' perceptions and knowledge of planetary health (PH) and evaluate the application of the educational material "Patient and Clinic through the Lens of Planetary Health," which addresses "IWN" and "complexity" through the sociological lens of Actor-Network Theory, in an integrative course at a medical school in Brazil...

The article extends the literature on the construction of "diversity management" by personnel managers in corporate America. Such research has highlighted that Human Resource (HR) specialists draw heavily on social-scientific thinking in implementing various remedies against discrimination. However, it has paid less attention to how such esoteric views of reality, comprising such "things" as "structural barriers" impeding occupational advancement and "diversity sensitivity," have been successfully established as a self-evident reality in the workplace...

OBJECTIVE: To identify and discuss theory-based studies of large-scale health information technology programs in the UK National Health Service. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Using the PRISMA systematic review framework, we searched Scopus, PubMed and CINAHL databases from inception to March 2022 for theory-based studies of large-scale health IT implementations. We undertook detailed full-text analyses of papers meeting our inclusion criteria. RESULTS: Forty-six studies were included after assessment for eligibility, of which twenty-five applied theories from the information systems arena (socio-technical approaches, normalization process theory, user acceptance theories, diffusion of innovation), twelve from sociology (structuration theory, actor-network theory, institutional theory), while nine adopted other theories...

Diabetes is a global public health issue. The Public Health Agency of Canada published a Diabetes Framework 2022 which recommends collaborative work across sectors to mitigate the impact of diabetes on health and quality of life. Since 2020, the INMED-COMMUNITY pathway has been implemented in Laval, Québec developing collaboration between healthcare and community sectors through a participatory action research approach. The aim of this article is to gain a better understanding of the INMED-COMMUNITY pathway implementation process, based on the mobilization of network actor theory...

INTRODUCTION: In low- and middle-income countries, public-private partnerships (PPPs) are often used to support the delivery of primary health care (PHC). We explore the processes of collaboration in a corporate social responsibility investment in PHC that was delivered through a PPP model in Western Province, Papua New Guinea, in 2009-2018 to strengthen PHC services. METHODS: Qualitative interviews were conducted with stakeholders in the PPP (N=20). Key program documents were also reviewed...

This study aimed to analyse intersectoral arrangements among the health, education and social assistance sectors in the operationalization of the Bolsa Família Program (BFP). A qualitative approach was carried out, in a peripheral region of a large urban centre of Southeast Brazil. Data content analysis was performed on the basis of reference in the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) using statements by the actors and considering ideas in dispute and work processes in the geopolitical territorial context. Seventeen managers of Municipal Secretariats of Health, Education and Social Assistance were interviewed, as were basic education, primary health care and social assistance professionals...

In 2008, Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall published an article titled "Sovereignty and the UFO," which demonstrated how a UFO taboo in international relations theory upheld an anthropocentric model of sovereignty. At a distance of a decade and a half, this review evaluates the validity of the claim that a UFO taboo exists in international relations, and explores the citational practices that influence the prestige economy of the field. The article employs a methodology of interpretive scientometrics informed by methodological debates in political science and international, as well as theoretical debates in actor-network theory...

Prisoners are a critical source of prison regulation around the world, but regulation by (rather than of ) prisoners remains little analysed. In this article, we utilise the 1990 riots at HMP Strangeways (England), as a case study of prisoners (re)shaping imprisonment. We examine prisoners' roles in these riots and subsequent cross-sectoral regulatory activities. We innovatively use the four-phase process of translation from actor-network theory to guide document analysis of (1) Lord Woolf's official inquiry into the riots and (2) the voluntary organisation Prison Reform Trust's follow-up report...

BACKGROUND: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a progressive and disabling lung condition with a high mortality. Our research has shown that health care for end-of-life COPD is poorly integrated. The aim of this study was to involve people with end-of-life COPD, their support people and health professionals in the design of healthcare services to help improve the delivery of care for advanced COPD, including informing system-level quality improvement. DESIGN: We conducted a focus group study involving stakeholders of healthcare services: people with end-of life COPD, support people, bereaved support people, and community- and hospital-based health care professionals...

In this paper, I develop features of a material gerontology which are summarised in the concept of "distributed age(ing);" that is, age(ing) that is distributed across and co-constituted through meanings, roles, and identities, as well as human and non-human forms of materiality, their productive dimensions and their relations to each other. The starting point is the critique of the human-centredness of gerontological approaches and, thus, the lack of a systematic conceptual consideration of non-human forms of materiality and agency in the context of age(ing)...

In this article we examine the fragmented interpretation and implementation of a remarkably popular concept, value-based health care (VBHC). By building on a case study of a project team working on the development of value-based primary care services for elderly patients, we shed new light on the way in which VBHC transitions from theory to practice. The concept of 'translation' is used to theoretically frame our analysis. Between June 2021 and May 2022, we gathered data through participant observation (50 h), semi-structured interviews (n = 20) and document analysis (n = 16)...

PURPOSE: This paper aims to examine the spatial attributes in the hospital ward environment and their impact on medical students' learning and experience of the clinical workplace. MATERIALS AND METHODS: An ethnographic study was conducted in a Scottish teaching hospital, combining observations and interviews over a period of 10 months. Two teaching wards served as the field-sites where approximately 120 h of non-participant observations took place sequentially...

The material turn has challenged traditional social scientific and humanistic research approaches. Both individual and community are rejected as a starting point for theorizing what is going on in societies and cultures. In fact, all dichotomies are deemed suspect, and the research focus draws heavily on actual practices. The concept heterogeneous assemblage is used in at least two strands of the material turn with slightly different takes on the entangled nature of practices. These are actor-network theory, ANT ( cf...

INTRODUCTION: Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, two ICU triage guidelines were developed in the Netherlands-the Pandemic Guideline and the Guideline Code Black-ostensibly to tackle the threat of absolute care scarcity. Healthcare guidelines are generally based on evidence and prescribe what healthcare professionals should do in certain situations. We used the institutional work perspective, focusing on the human agency to create, maintain, and/or disrupt institutional structures, to study the development of these guidelines and observed that they did a lot more than just offering guidance to healthcare professionals...

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This commentary examines the claim made by Borst et al that knowledge translation (KT) should look to Science and Technology Studies (STS), the sociology of translation, and constructionist views on knowledge, and begin to think of the sustainability of a certain practice as construction work in continuous progress, and not as states to be reached once and for all. While endorsing this claim, the present commentary also argues that what it calls the "epistemic reframing" behind the new construal of KT in Borst must be supplemented with approaches that goes beyond the sociology of translation...

INTRODUCTION: Delivery of end-of-life care for severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) has been hampered by an unpredictable disease trajectory and poor integration of health care and social services. OBJECTIVE: To critically explore the perspectives, values, and experiences of stakeholders in COPD end-of-life healthcare services in a large district in Aotearoa New Zealand. DESIGN: Focus groups analysed utilising critical theory and Actor-Network Theory...

INTRODUCTION: The slow pace of change in respect of increasing the diversity of medical students suggests powerful actors are reproducing practices to support the status quo. Opening up medicine to embrace diversity thus requires the deconstruction of entrenched processes and practices. The first step in doing so is to understand how the actor-network of widening participation and access to medicine (WP/WA) is constructed. Thus, here we examine how the connections among actors in WP/WA in two different networks are assembled...

Industrial parks make great contributions to the local economy, society, and culture, but they have also encountered many problems, such as limited resources, the longevity of ecological restoration, and the contagion of safety accidents. As a socioeconomic and ecological composite system formed by the interaction of multiple stakeholders, the solutions to succeed in workplace sustainability in industrial parks are still not known. The purpose of this study is to explore how to integrate existing resources to achieve a win-win situation in industrial park safety and environmental protection issues...

Adaptive multi-agent cooperation with especially unseen partners is becoming more challenging in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) research, whereby conventional deep-learning-based algorithms suffer from the poor new-player-generalization problem, possibly caused by not considering theory-of-mind theory (ToM). Inspired by the ToM personality in cognitive psychology, where a human can easily resolve this problem by predicting others' intuitive personality first before complex actions, we propose a biologically-plausible algorithm named the mixture of personality (MoP) improved spiking actor network (SAN)...