Putting the book together

Just like runners, writers have a length to which they seem naturally suited. For me, it's about 8000 words - the perfect length for an article in Social Science and Medicine or Sociology of Health and Illness. So for me, beginning to assemble something ten times that length is a purgatorial. I say assembling, rather than writing. Much of what will appear in May and Finch's Normalizing Health Technologies has already been written in one way or another. So I am arranging and organizing what has already been composed and identifying the gaps. 

What's purgatorial about writing a book? I'm immensely privileged, of course. I'm being paid to put our thoughts down on paper, Tracy Finch and I have a publisher arranged (Palgrave MacMillan), and funding for a conference in London next year when we will be able to launch the book alongside the web-enabled toolkit and users manual for Normalization Process Theory. So in some ways, it's a pretty spectacular deal. We're privileged too, because we're getting in near what may be the end of the paper book.

Nothing is ever enough, of course, and so I'm complaining about having to identify the gaps. Our book is part research monograph (reporting on a ten year program of research on telemedicine in the UK) and part introduction to a theory of implementation, embedding, and integration of new technologies/techniques. So the 'gaps' may actually be the spaces where the links between the two come alive. We'll have to wait and see. I think that's what I'm aiming for as I assemble the parts and glue them together with new writing. 

There are some important questions that need to be answered. The book has to do this, I think. One is about the relative location of Normalization Process Theory and other relevant theories - especially Diffusion of Innovations Theory and Actor Network Theory - and how much coverage to give them. We're locating our work in the Science and Technology Studies tradition - and I see the Wikipedia entry for STS places my work within the 'turn to materiality' - but it plainly doesn't quite fit with STS. That's a more complex problem that probably won't get solved in the book. I'm lucky though - I have a lovely garden to work in on a sunny day.

Finally, my friend Carolyn Chew-Graham has been promoted to a personal chair in general practice at Manchester University medical school. Wonderful news....