The discourse on stress and the reproduction of conventional knowledge

A framework emphasizing the importance of utility and context to knowledge producers, particularly the researchers' informants, and the social determinants of knowledge is adopted.

Abstract

Stress researchers produce evidence that certain historically particular beliefs about the social order actually describe a universal reality. The theories and social relations which produce this evidence are also responsible for the way in which the scholarly discourse on stress has developed: its search for context-free knowledge, its failure to critically analyze the role of cognition in pathogenesis, and its capacity for de-socializing the social determinants of sickness and people's perceptions of sickness. To make these points. I adopt a framework emphasizing (1) the importance of utility and context to knowledge producers, particularly the researchers' informants, and (2) the social determinants of scien- tific knowledge.