EJT:s högre seminarieserie

Martijn van der Steen, University of Groningen will present his work on “Accounting for life: the commodification of the declining body and mind”. After the presentation we will have an open discussion.

Summary:
"This project involves a case study at a relatively small home for elderly suffering from dementias such as Alzheimer's Disease, which found itself faced with major changes in the quantification of life by the Dutch government. As the financing of the care for the elderly was tied to the severity of the stages in which Alzheimer’s had progressed, its fate had become intimately connected to the bodily and mental health of its residents. Drawing on the broad theoretical apparatus of the sociology of care, the project seeks to understand the quantification of the deteriorating body and mind in governmental attempts to make health (not care) of clients appear malleable, under the guise of “entrepreneurial" health care. The ultimate assimilation of the home into a large consortium of health care institutions illustrates how the use of accounting to conflate quality of care with quality of life led to the commodification of client health - attributes available for barter and trade, but only in sufficiently sizeable markets inside large-scale health
care conglomerates. The project therefore argues that the often observed scale enlargements in health care may not only be out of a need for cost minimisation, but also due to a need to generate markets for the trade of bodily attributes, in this case, the stages of dementia and life expectancy."