Instrumental Activism at the End of Life: Theorizing the Role of American Culture in the Provision of Aggressive Medical Care
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2013
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Haverford College. Department of Sociology
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Thesis
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eng
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Abstract
In this thesis, I move to situate the provision of "aggressive" end of life care within the broader context of Americans' cultural understandings of death and dying. Drawing principally from the works of Talcott Parsons, Victor Lidz, and Renée C. Fox, I argue that Americans approach death with a cultural orientation of “instrumental activism,” a pattern of action whose roots in a neo-Weberian conceptualization of the Protestant Ethic leads individuals to dedicate themselves to activities that, on rational grounds, seek “to maximize human control over the conditional elements of the life situation” (Parsons and Lidz 1967: 139). As a result, I hypothesize, individuals steeped in an American cultural orientation of “instrumental activism” are more apt to embrace aggressive care—like CPR—at the end of life even with the knowledge that such interventions might not prove successful in the meaningful extension of life.