ABSTRACT
This chapter reports on one aspect of a broader ethnographic study of a British regional psychiatric training scheme. It is based on one year's fieldwork observation and twenty semi-structured interviews with trainee psychiatrists. The chapter explores a number of features of the reproduction of occupational culture. Clinical practice lies at the heart of the medical enterprise. It focuses on the reproduction of clinical knowledge as trainee psychiatrists engage in clinical work. The chapter examines and situates the techniques by which psychiatric knowledge and practice are reproduced within the broader study of social reproduction and the sociology of knowledge. It examines two such sources of contingency: the nature of inter-professional processes in teamwork, and the nature of the psychiatric knowledge base itself. One of the most critical encounters in a psychiatrist's introduction to clinical practice is the work of the ward round. In clinical training registrars become increasingly involved in documenting psychiatric clinical reality.
