ABSTRACT
Within medical sociology in Britain the continuing existence of what are sometimes referred to as ‘health variations’ is uncontroversial. Scarcely more so is the significance of social class as a, if perhaps no longer the, key underlying source of these variations or, as they were formerly and will here be designated, ‘inequalities’. By and large, studies into health inequalities involving medical sociologists have been conducted within a particular, dominant paradigm or research programme which can be broadly characterized as positivist as defined, for example, by Giddens (1974), accommodating some cautious and thoughtful empirical as well as crassly empiricist work. It has been argued elsewhere that the dominance of this programme of research, and its seductiveness to medical sociologists, has led to the under-development or neglect of a more genuinely sociological and theoretical engagement with the issues, including a failure to take social class seriously as a phenomenon in its own right (Higgs and Scambler, 1998).
