Daniel Menchik

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Courses

Scholarly Contributions

Books

• Menchik, D., & Menchik, D. (2021). Managing Medical Authority. Princeton University Press.

Journals/Publications

• Menchik, D., & Giaquinta, M. (2024). The words we die by. Social Science and Medicine, 340. doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2023.116470
  More info

  Hospice is a venue organized to provide a “good death” for patients and family. Since many hospice patients are bedridden and often incoherent or unconscious, many of this venue's interactions take place between hospice professionals and patients' families. The families of patients desire definitive prognoses because knowing what to expect can help them decide how to act, but for professionals such knowledge is characterized by doubt. In light of their needs, how then do hospice professionals use language to achieve and maintain the family's buy-in? Drawing on eight months of observation in Hospice House Interdisciplinary Team (IDT) meetings, we analyze the verbal interactions between hospice professionals and patients' families, focusing in particular on registers of prognosis, to better understand how hospice professionals use language to manage family expectations. In order to accomplish this goal central to their occupational project, hospice professionals use future grammars, primarily comprising predictive and subjunctive verbs. Imperative verbs are rarely used. We refine the enactive perspective on authoritativeness by identifying some linguistic components that mediate authority's efficacy in a venue where emotion management is central to professional work. Paying attention to the uses of these linguistic registers helps us further understand some everyday ways that death is organized, and in general, may offer a richer understanding of death itself.
• Menchik, D. A. (2022). Automating Expert Labor in Medicine: What Are the Questions?. American Behavioral Scientist, 000276422211272. doi:10.1177/00027642221127248
• Menchik, D., & Lehpamer, N. (2022). Learning to See Like a Medical Sociologist: Comparing One- Versus Two-Semester Fieldwork-Based Courses. Teaching Sociology, 51(1), 41-56. doi:10.1177/0092055x221104837
• Menchik, D. A. (2021). Authority Beyond Institutions: The Expert's Multivocal Process of Gaining and Sustaining Authoritativeness. American Journal of Cultural Sociology, 1--28.
• Menchik, D. A. (2020). Moving from Adoption to Use: Physicians' Mixed Commitments in Deciding to Use Robotic Technologies. Work and Occupations, 47(3), 314--347.
• Menchik, D. A. (2019). Tethered Venues: Discerning Distant Influences on a Fieldsite. Sociological Methods & Research, 48(4), 850--876.
• Menchik, D. A. (2017). Interdependent Career Types and Divergent Standpoints on the use of Advanced Technology in Medicine. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 58(4), 488--502.
• Tian, X., & Menchik, D. A. (2016). On Violating One’s Own Privacy: N-adic Utterances and Inadvertent Disclosures in Online Venues. Studies in Media and Communications, 11, 3--31.
• Menchik, D. A. (2014). Decisions about Knowledge in Medical Practice: The Effect of Temporal Features of a Task. American Journal of Sociology, 120(3), 701--749.
• Menchik, D. A. (2014). Simmel's Dynamic Social Medicine: New Questions for Studying Medical Institutions?. Social Science & Medicine, 107, 100--104.
• Menchik, D. A., & Jin, L. (2014). When do Doctors Follow Patients’ Orders? Organizational Mechanisms of Physician Influence. Social Science Research, 48, 171--184.
• Menchik, D. A. (2010). The Social Life of the Clinical Trial. Qualitative Sociology, 33(4), 591--593.
• Menchik, D. A., & Meltzer, D. O. (2010). The Cultivation of Esteem and Retrieval of Scientific Knowledge in Physician Networks. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 51(2), 137--152.
• Menchik, D. A., & Tian, X. (2008). Putting Social Context into Text: The Semiotics of E-mail Interaction. American Journal of Sociology, 114(2), 332--370.
• Menchik*, D. A. (2004). Placing Cybereducation in the UK Classroom. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 25(2), 193--213.