Healthcare Activism, Marketization, and the Collective Good

This introductory chapter charts the book’s trajectory by engaging with three interlinked key dynamics of contemporary healthcare—marketization, digitalization, and individualization. It draws on several theoretical frameworks to conceptualize notions of the common, collective, or public good and to consider how healthcare activism may play into defining and defending the collective good when faced with the outlined societal, economic, and scientific dynamics. Presenting contemporary examples from the Covid-19 pandemic, the chapter argues that the way activists define and defend the collective good can only fully be understood by grasping how this good is shaped by other, often more dominant, stakeholders in healthcare: governmental institutions, professional experts, scientists, and private industry—the latter being a focal point of concern for this current volume.