Parallel Worlds Under One Roof: Knowledge, Professional Boundaries, and Traditional Chinese Medicine

• In Event: Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 15: Healthcare Organizations

Abstract

This paper asks how professional authority and legitimacy are organized when one form of medicine is institutionally included yet epistemically subordinated. It focuses on the contemporary revival of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) in China, examining how TCM and Western medicine (WM) coexist within a state-regulated healthcare system shaped by policy mandates, insurance incentives, and cultural politics.
In recent years, the Chinese state has intensified its institutional support for TCM by mandating its inclusion in top-tier hospitals, subsidizing its use through the national medical insurance system, and increasing funding for TCM-related research. Yet these policies have generated uneven consequences in everyday medical practice and research. Despite formal inclusion, TCM remains hierarchically positioned beneath WM in terms of professional authority and scientific legitimacy, subjecting TCM practitioners to persistent pressure to translate their knowledge into biomedical forms legible within modern scientific paradigms. As a result, TCM occupies a paradoxical position: politically endorsed and organizationally embedded, yet epistemically inferior.
Drawing on the sociology of professions, medical sociology, and the sociology of technology and science (STS), this study analyzes how professional boundaries between TCM and WM are continually negotiated within the institutionalized medical field in China. Empirically, it is based on multi-sited qualitative research, including 47 in-depth interviews with TCM practitioners, WM practitioners, administrators, and trainees, as well as participant observation conducted in hospitals, medical universities, and professional training programs across multiple regions in China.
The preliminary findings show that efforts to enhance TCM’s legitimacy often require practitioners to conform to biomedical standards of scientificity, including experimental reductionism and standardization, generating ambivalence, pragmatism, and cynicism toward the process of scientificization.

Author

• Xueqia Zhang, Emory University