In my most recent research project, I consider health care delivery reform for vulnerable populations. Over the past year I have conducted a study of contentious transitions to specialized Medicaid Managed Care plans in the state of Illinois. This study investigates the attempts of a large insurance provider and state agencies to manage expectations about their responsibilities in providing coverage to a vulnerable population. This project expands on my research on the politics of ethics by assessing the capacity of health care organizations to adapt to ethical concerns in the midst of reform. Through this research, I aim to develop theory about the ways that ethical responsibilities regarding health disparities are understood to be distributed throughout a health care network, and to observe how health care resources are imagined and adjusted in the midst of infrastructural upheaval.

The Politics of Ethics.

Ethical Infrastructures.

I am currently in the process of completing a book manuscript, tentatively titled Ethical Infrastructures: The Politics of Organizational Standard-Setting. This book unites 3 case studies (professional medical associations, a large Protestant denomination, and corporate compliance) to investigate the strategic—and often conflictual—work of creating organizational ethics policy. I demonstrate that even as members of organizations are skeptical about the extent to which ethics standards shape behavior, the creation of these standards matters a great deal because this process provides opportunities to engage with an imagined moral infrastructure. By creating ethics standards, members of organizations are able to understand their actions as guided by a systematic design and undergirded by stable principles. In practice, these moral infrastructures are not actually comprehensively designed systems. Nor are they truly stable. As a result, organizational actors must engage in strategies to cause ethics policy to appear as systematic—even as it is not. This book provides important insights about why organizational ethics have limited success in producing behavioral changes by demonstrating that the process of creating ethics actually diminishes the perceived need for change.

A Dialogue on Professional Medical Associations and Health Policy.

Physicians around the world play a major role in shaping and influencing health policy. However, there is a paucity of research that systematically examines this topic in the context of developing countries, including India. In the increasingly globalized world of biomedicine, there are considerable lessons and ideas to be drawn from examining the experiences of organized medicine and policymaking in different countries.

An Interdisciplinary Workshop on Politics and Strategy in Medical Associations.

Professional medical associations around the world have historically been conduits for channeling physician interests into policy. Today, these associations remain powerful national stakeholders despite increasingly crowded policy arenas and threats to their power by populist movements, the privatization/corporatization of healthcare and the fragmentation of organized medicine.

Health or Politics.

In recent years, the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) has debated and developed organizational stances on issues as varied as nuclear disarmament, gay marriage, policing, and climate change. This article considers the relationship of “political” policies to the ongoing maintenance of this professional association over time.

Featured Interviews:

“Focus on the Family Revives Brio, a Christian magazine for Teenage Girls”
NEW YORK TIMES, Liam Stack

“‘There’s no suggestion in the magazine that teenagers should completely remove themselves from pop culture and mainstream society, but at the same time there is an expectation of constant vigilance about how you engage with those things and about what you’re consuming and how you’re consuming it,’ [Brophy] said.”

“Christian Teen Magazine 'Brio' Returns With A 'Biblical Worldview'
NPR, Sarah McCammon

“‘It will be interesting to see these things play out in a moment where these teenagers are probably less sheltered than possibly the teenagers who were reading the magazine in the early ‘90,’ [Brophy] says. ‘Because it was possible in the early ‘90s to live a life where you didn’t necessarily have to engage these issues as much.’”

Abstract.

The term “orthodox” is often used to characterize religious communities who understand themselves to hold a stable set of practices or beliefs. However, as is the case with any group, orthodox communities experience ideological fragmentation and change. How then, do communities who identify as orthodox maintain the perception of orthodoxy in spite of ideological fragmentation and change? I describe activities engaged in by a conservative Protestant denomination in the service of orthodoxy. I draw on archival and field research in this denomination in order to demonstrate how the orthodox: (i) project future threats; (ii) develop strategies for obstruction; and (iii) coordinate in-group interactions.