Editorial.

Welcome to the fifteenth volume of Health Sociology Review. In this issue we have papers analysing the health experiences, health policies, and health care systems of various countries, including Australia, China and North America. The first tranche of papers examine some of the basic conceptual building blocks of health care and health policy research: agency and structure, social class, race, consumers and community participation, and the notion of a life-pathway. A second set investigates issues of topical interest within the health care system, specifically the accreditation of doctors, and nursing care for obese patients. A third group turns the focus toward reproductive health, investigating the practice of paternity testing, fatherhood, and women's post-partum health care needs.

William Cockerham starts the issue with a timely reminder of the role of both structure and agency in the determination and prevalence of disease, and argues for caution in applying theoretical models--developed to explain ill-health in the West--to the Asian context. Given the research evidence from the West of the relationship between health, individual choice, behaviour, social norms, lifestyle, life-chances, and social class; Cockerham surveys existing, though somewhat sparse evidence of the impact of social class on health lifestyle practices in the Asian context, and proposes a model which may assist in future research.

Also concerned with the Asian region is a paper by Jingqing Yang on the privatisation of professional knowledge in the Chinese health care system. Yang argues that despite prohibitions against charging patients for services in the predominantly public health care system, the practice of 'red packets' is widely prevalent, and constitutes a form of unofficial sanction for medical professionals to increase their income. Moreover, the sale of professional skills and expertise--forms of intellectual property and practice traditionally owned by the state--are increasingly considered by the public and medical professionals to be private property. Yang suggests that the complicity of the public in the practice of 'red packets' has placed pressure on the state to soften its regulation of medical professionals. The tentative, and as yet unofficial privatisation of medical, professional knowledge in China, indicates the first steps have been taken in the emergence of a private health care market.

David McCallum takes us from the Asian region to Australia, with his historical paper on the removal of Aboriginal children during the 19th century from their families and taken into state care. McCallum's focus is on the construction of 'race' as a category which enabled the state to act differently toward various populations. The author shows that neglected white children were considered in need of state care, as were healthy 'half-caste' Aboriginal children; yet weak or deprived Aboriginal children were returned to the missions and their family context without further state intervention. McCallum's analysis provides an illustration of how the filtering lens of race has led to differing state responses to the bodily health of groups within the population.

The subsequent paper takes us from a focus on race to the consumer of health care services. Judy Taylor, David Wilkinson and Brian Cheers tease out the differences between consumer and community participation in health care planning and programs. They indicate the conflation of these terms is not accidental, for encouraging consumers rather than communities to be involved with government agencies is consistent with the rise of managerialism and the increasing privatisation of services during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Health policies directed at individuals, rather than communities, enables the state to take the 'less political' route, for this means it can transfer the responsibility for problems which stem from the structural location of an individual, to the individual ...