The discourse on stress and the reproduction of conventional knowledge

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.