Carol A. Heimer - Böcker

This study examines the organization of social responsibility in the USA, in particular of critically ill newborn children. Drawing on medical records and interviews with parents and medical staff, the book investigates two neonatal intensive care units, showing the traumas of extreme medical measures, and the sufferings of infants. The accounts are by turns disturbing and heroic, as parents and staff attempt to take charge of the infants' care, redefining their roles as adults and parents, and coping with sometimes awful contingencies. Rather than treating responsibility as an ethical issue, the book focuses on how responsibility is socially produced and sustained. It questions how staff members encourage parents to take responsibility, but keep them from interfering in medical matters, and how parents encourage staff vigilance when they are novices attempting to supervise the experts. The authors conclude that it is not sufficient simply to be responsible individuals. Instead, people must learn to be responsible in an organizational world, and organizations must learn how to support responsible individuals.

A deep examination of how new, legalistic norms affected the trajectory of global HIV care and altered the practice of medicine.HIV emerged in the world at a time when medicine and healthcare were undergoing two major transformations: globalization and a turn toward legally inflected, rule-based ways of doing things. It accelerated both trends. While pestilence and disease are generally considered the domain of biological sciences and medicine, social arrangements—and law in particular—are also crucial. Drawing on years of research in HIV clinics in the United States, Thailand, South Africa, and Uganda, Governing the Global Clinic examines how growing norms of legalized accountability have altered the work of healthcare systems and how the effects of legalization vary across different national contexts. A key feature of legalism is universalistic language, but, in practice, rules are usually imported from richer countries (especially the United States) to poorer ones that have less adequate infrastructure and fewer resources with which to implement them. Challenging readers to reconsider the impulse to use law to organize and govern social life, Governing the Global Clinic poses difficult questions: When do rules solve problems, and when do they create new problems? When do rules become decoupled from ethics, and when do they lead to deeper moral commitments? When do rules reduce inequality? And when do they reflect, reproduce, and even amplify inequality?

A deep examination of how new, legalistic norms affected the trajectory of global HIV care and altered the practice of medicine.HIV emerged in the world at a time when medicine and healthcare were undergoing two major transformations: globalization and a turn toward legally inflected, rule-based ways of doing things. It accelerated both trends. While pestilence and disease are generally considered the domain of biological sciences and medicine, social arrangements—and law in particular—are also crucial. Drawing on years of research in HIV clinics in the United States, Thailand, South Africa, and Uganda, Governing the Global Clinic examines how growing norms of legalized accountability have altered the work of healthcare systems and how the effects of legalization vary across different national contexts. A key feature of legalism is universalistic language, but, in practice, rules are usually imported from richer countries (especially the United States) to poorer ones that have less adequate infrastructure and fewer resources with which to implement them. Challenging readers to reconsider the impulse to use law to organize and govern social life, Governing the Global Clinic poses difficult questions: When do rules solve problems, and when do they create new problems? When do rules become decoupled from ethics, and when do they lead to deeper moral commitments? When do rules reduce inequality? And when do they reflect, reproduce, and even amplify inequality?

Reactive Risk and Rational Action: Managing Moral Hazard in Insurance Contracts offers a sophisticated anatomy of how insurers confront losses that change precisely because insurance exists. Rather than treating pricing as a purely actuarial exercise, the book shows why markets “thin” when incentives shift and why insurers embed hierarchy inside contracts to steady calculation. Beginning with a clear definition of reactive risk—loss probabilities that move in response to policyholder behavior—the author reframes moral hazard as a strategic interaction, not just a pricing nuisance. Core chapters track how institutions convert reactive risks into fixed ones: aligning incentives through deductibles, coinsurance, and experience rating; relocating key safeguards to third parties (building codes, inspection regimes, classification societies); and continuously re-valuing property to preserve indemnity and deter fraud. Through tightly argued case studies—urban fire insurance, risks at sea, and surety bonding—the book ties rating and underwriting practices to real-world constraints like distance from decision makers, information asymmetries, and organizational control.Bridging decision theory and the economics of institutions, the study demonstrates how insurance markets endure only when contracts create a “community of fate” between insurer and insured—making prevention, not just payout, the common objective. Methodological notes on how insurers model individuals and organizations complement analyses of warranties, sue-and-labor clauses, general average, salvage, and valuation rules, revealing why some hazards prove insurable and others do not. The concluding theory of reactive risk connects calculation to governance: when incentives and oversight are designed well, insurers can price rare events without inviting them; when they are not, markets unravel. The enduring takeaway is crisp and consequential: managing moral hazard is less about better odds and more about better institutions—insurance works when contracts strategically reshape behavior so that markets can function at all.This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1985.