Emerging perspectives of health as individualized and privatized capital seem promising to shed light on the construction of individual health in the face of the growing individualization of healthcare. This article reviews extant perspectives of health as capital, reflecting upon how a conceptualization of health capital might be conceived by two of the main contrasting traditions: human capital theory affiliated with the Chicago School of Economics and Bourdieusian concepts of social field and capital. Arguing that a Bourdieusian perspective is potentially more fruitful to capture the importance of social and cultural dimensions in the construction of individual health, this article arrives at a conceptualization of health capital as the aggregate of the actual or potential resources possessed by a given agent that have the capacity to affect the position of agents in the social field of health. Drawing on Bourdieu’s conceptualization of forms of capital, this article discusses the efficacy, the legitimation, and the positioning of health capital, uncovering its potential for understanding contemporary trends in health practices and health discourse.

Since its introduction in 1960, the combined oral contraceptive pill has become the dominant reversible contraceptive technology for controlling female fertility in spite of early and ongoing ethical, critical medical, and societal disapproval. Over the last decade, prescription rates among young women in Western Europe have declined alongside the rise of social media use. This article investigates the mechanisms underlying this change in contraceptive choices and the role played by social media in this trend. Via exploratory online observation and an in-depth interview study with 19 informants in Germany and Denmark, we find social media consolidates the social construction of hazards associated with the contraceptive pill by reshaping young women's risk perception from questions around drug reliability and safety to those of individual physical, mental, and social well-being. We shed light on how social media contributes to the delegitimation of health professionals such as gynaecologists and general practitioners and adds to wider debates on the erosion of medical authority and the attendant rise of peer influencers. We condense our findings into a framework for health-related attitude formation and decision-making in the social media age, which elucidates how social media amplifies and reshapes societal discourses regarding health-related technologies, choices, and risks.

Patient empowerment is a key topic in public health, medical sociology and in public debates on the modernisation of healthcare. This article joins the on-going discussion on public and patient involvement by offering a patient-centred perspective on patient empowerment outside the usual institutionalised context of chronic disease management. We present results from a qualitative study on individuals’ practices of dealing with acute non-life-threatening medical conditions conducted from 2012 to 2017 in Denmark. Based on 34 home visits including in-depth interviews and participant observations with a sample of 28 informants, we uncover a spectrum of four patient tactics governing these practices: delegating, informing, consuming and resisting. The findings suggest disruptive changes to the role of the patient–physician relationship as well as the existence of practices indicative of patient empowerment outside the context of patient empowerment initiatives. Some patients are found to take over responsibility for their health, employing tactics where the role of general practitioners is severely demoted. These empirical contributions lead to the two theoretical contributions of the article: an extension of an existing model of patient empowerment and a conceptual reconsideration of patient empowerment, advocating viewing it as emerging from a bricolage of tactical interactions with social environments rather than as the consequence of an external strategic process.

Consumer research has posited an ambivalent role of choice in consumer empowerment, from liberating and including to disciplining and totalising. This article provides empirical evidence for this ambivalence and nuances how consumers navigate the liminal space between expert authority and consumer autonomy. We investigate the role of choice in consumer empowerment through an ethnographic study of medicine consumption practices in acute non-life-threatening situations in Denmark, finding these practices to be dominated by consumer choice, not only for over-the-counter but, interestingly, also for prescription-only medicine. The implications of these findings extend beyond the context of medicine consumption. First, we provide insights on the ambivalent role of choice in consumer empowerment in a complex context of mixed commercial and public agencies. Second, we demonstrate how online information access empowers consumers to resist expert authority and act autonomously. Third, we exemplify the processes by which globalisation and ideologies inform and shape consumer resistance.

Smart assisted living technologies are often touted as the solution to the challenges associated with an ageing population. Viewing elderly consumers, their relatives, and technologies as comprising an assemblage, this article aims to understand how smart objects actively reshape the everyday practices in families with elderly consumers. Interviews with and observations of users of smart alarm systems indicate a stratification of the paired experiences of users and systems and identify a tension between enabling experiences of the elderly and constraining experiences of the relatives. This article contributes to views of families with elderly as assemblages by providing insights into joint and disjoint consumer experiences in multiple consumer-object assemblages, identity negotiations of the elderly and their relatives, and the hidden costs of smart assisted living technologies.