ABSTRACT
It is useful to begin by thinking of the hospital career provided for a dying trajectory as a succession of "transitional statuses" in the status passage between life and death, as it takes place in the hospital. The kind of analysis required when studying temporal order brings discussion to the two other topics of this chapter— structural process and status passage. If one considers dying as a process extending over time, then the hospital's structure can be seen as continually changing to handle different phases in that process. Sociological analysis ordinarily does not join structure and process as tightly as our notion of "structural process" does. Perhaps the point that most requires underlining, however, is that structural process has consequences which themselves enter into the emergence of a new structural process. The major dimensions of a dying trajectory as a status passage are unquestionably the ones noted earlier, in opposition to Van Gennep's discussions.
