The cause of death vs. the gift of life: Boundary maintenance and the politics of expertise in death investigation

Abstract

In late modernity, conflicts about professional jurisdiction have gained in intensity because the emergence of new technologies can drastically alter the grounds for expertise. In the United States, medical examiners have the legal mandate to investigate and certify suspicious deaths, straddling the disparate worlds of public health and criminal justice. Over the last decade, procurement organisations fuelled by advances in immunology and surgical techniques have challenged medical examiners' jurisdiction, requesting access to the corpse for organ and tissue transplantation purposes. Building further on Andrew Abbott's The System of Professions (1988), this article investigates jurisdictional relationships between professions when an emerging profession makes inroads on the jurisdiction of an established profession. Taking the vantage point of the established profession, I have distinguished three different conflictual jurisdictional relationships: a subordinated, a standardised and a commodified jurisdictional relationship. These relationships will be evaluated for the extent that they are able to preserve the mission of death investigators.