Breast‐Feeding Advocacy, Risk Society and Health Moralism: A Decade’s Scholarship
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article reviews research published this century that engages critically with the mantra ‘Breast is Best’ and the associated expansion of official breast‐feeding promotion programmes. In recent years there has been a marked increase in the number of such studies published. They mostly explore experience in English speaking, industrialised countries (the US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Great Britain) which are in some social and cultural respects dissimilar, yet where very similar developments and problems are detected in regards to breast‐feeding promotion. We highlight how this exploration of breast‐feeding promotion internationally has developed understanding of wider sociological themes. This scholarship, we suggest, has provided a powerful illustration of the relation between risk society (more particularly a heightened consciousness of risk) and the evolution of a code of conduct that regulates behaviour, that has been termed ‘health moralizm’. The article covers three themes: ‘Science, risk society, authority and choice’; ‘Public health policy and infant feeding’; and ‘Moralization and women’s identity work’. We conclude that the research discussed shows how the sociological imagination continues to shed light on the relation between private troubles and public issues. We also suggest one conclusion that can be drawn from this research is that official discourse and everyday maternal experience appear increasingly distant from each other.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".