Institutional Fads and the Medicalization of Drug Addiction

The purpose of this article is to historically review biologically based explanations of drug addiction to demonstrate the increased utility of the institutional fads approach in understanding modern medicalization. Our examination reveals that the medicalization of drug addiction has been long in the making, traveling through numerous fads that have attributed drug addiction to various biological matter, including body type or constitution, genetics, psychopathology, and neuroscience or brain imaging. These explanations follow a common trajectory (emerging, surging, and purging) in institutional fad research. Moreover, our analysis indicates that while scientific and technological developments have shaped these approaches’ influence and pathways, so too have political actors and institutional agendas. We begin by discussing how an institutional fads approach enables an improved understanding of the medicalization of drug addiction – a form of deviance – followed by a critique of four main biological explanations: body constitution, genetics, psychopathology, and brain chemistry/imaging. Our review pinpoints the specific narratives advanced and the academic and political interests at work. In doing so, it exposes the limitations of medicalizing one of the nation’s oldest social problems.     

SOLIDARITY AND DRUG USE IN THE ELECTRONIC DANCE MUSIC SCENE

Current research and theory on rave culture has articulated a link between solidarity and drug use, although the precise nature of this relationship remains unclear. Work conducted in the field of cultural studies contends that while rave participants engage in drug use, it is by no means the exclusive source of solidarity. However, work in the fields of public health and medical science portrays rave culture as a site of extensive drug consumption and personal risk, where solidarity is dismissed or dubiously acknowledged as chemically induced. Prior research has not sought to reconcile this tension, or to consider how the relationship between drug use and solidarity may have changed over time. Using data from a multimethod ethnography of the rave scene in Philadelphia, we found the drug use–solidarity relationship substantially more complicated than prior scholarship has articulated. Our discoveries, consequently, provide clarification of this relationship as well as advance the literatures on solidarity, collective identity, youth culture, and music scenes.     

Understanding the Alteration and Decline of a Music Scene: Observations from Rave Culture1

The sociological study of scenes—music and otherwise—has flourished in the latter twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries. Most research has documented a scene’s origins or its “evolution” into mainstream culture. Fewer studies have systematically addressed what leads to a scene’s alteration and decline, although many scholars have partially addressed it in authenticity studies anchored in the Frankfurt School’s claims about culture and economics. Are culture industries sufficient in explaining music scene transformation? The present article attempts to explain the cultural transformation of the Philadelphia rave scene and to articulate its relevance for other kinds of social worlds. Using a multimethod ethnographic approach, I show that five forces (generational schism, commercialization, cultural otherness/deviance and self destruction, social control, and genre‐based scene fragmentation) help explain the alteration and decline of the rave scene from its high point in the mid to late 1990s to its diminished and fragmented state presently. In describing these forces, I hope to move beyond culture industry narratives toward a broader explanation of cultural change, one that is lacking not only in music scene studies, but also in literatures on many other kinds of social worlds.     

A 'Rave' Review: Conceptual Interests and Analytical Shifts in Research on Rave Culture

Raves have historically referred to grassroots organized, antiestablishment and unlicensed all-night dance parties, featuring electronically produced dance music, such as techno, house, trance and drum and bass. Since their late-1980s origins in the UK, raves have gained widespread popularity and transformed dramatically. Consequently, their many cultural traits and behaviors have garnered much sociological interest, which mostly falls into two competing perspectives: cultural studies and public health. In this paper, we review what raves look like today compared to their high point in the 1990s. We then discuss how the cultural studies and public health perspectives define raves and have studied them over time, focusing on the 'pet' sociological concepts each has sought to advance. Our analysis of these literatures reveals important differences in rave research by country and over time. We end by discussing the politics associated with the shift in rave research.     

A framework for evaluating eHealth research

Health care is in the midst of a consumer-oriented technology explosion. Individuals of all ages and backgrounds have discovered eHealth. But the challenges of implementing and evaluating eHealth are just beginning to surface, and, as technology changes, new challenges emerge. Evaluation is critical to the future of eHealth. This article addresses four dimensions of eHealth evaluation: (1) design and methodology issues; (2) challenges related to the technology itself; (3) environmental issues that are not specific to eHealth but pose special problems for eHealth researchers; and (4) logistic or administrative concerns of the evaluation methodology selected. We suggest that these four dimensions must be integrated to provide a holistic framework for designing and implementing eHealth research projects, as well as for understanding the totality of the eHealth intervention. The framework must be flexible enough to adapt to a variety of end users, regardless of whether the end user is a healthcare organization, a for-profit business, a community organization, or an individual. The framework is depicted as a puzzle with four interlocking pieces.