ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some suggestions for policy change and reform. It achieves two different but interrelated purposes. First, make a contribution to sociological theory and understanding. And second, the theory and understanding arrived at through the research would result directly in specific and useful suggestions for policy change and reform. Socially responsible power must be used not just in the interest of those who wield it but in the service of other groups or indeed of the whole society. And this is just what the "professions" claim: that they are in the service of their clients, that the interests and welfare of their clients come first. The internal control mechanisms of biomedical science ought to pay some attention to this structure of competition and its possibilities for producing some undesirable consequences. Medical training programs, informal interaction structures, and peer review processes all ought to take some cognizance both of the competition itself and of its undesirable consequences under certain conditions.
