ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author transgresses some of the expectations that lay behind the joint conference. He starts as a complete novice in health economics. The author suggests that his position as a complete outsider provided a particularly valuable stance from which to address the various prescribed fragments of academic discourse. As a sociologist, he treated the particular exercise in cross-disciplinary reading as the equivalent to the exploration of an alien culture. The exercise of reading health economics was, then, particularly intriguing. The implicit assumptions about social action and actors' rationality are introduced, the ethnomethodologists argued, but unacknowledged as explanatory devices in analysts' reconstructions of social action. The health economists are happy to operate with a relatively unproblematic distinction between normative and positive work. The problem for the reader of an alien discipline – and therefore for many readers in general – is the lack of interpretive framework that may be brought to bear on the texts in question.
