An investigation into the phenomena and practices of spiritual ...

deviant behaviour. The difference between the parent/child relationship and the doctor/patient relationship lies in the ability and the maturity to seek medical advice and to fulfilthe social role assigned to the individual such as being the person who bring in the wage orthe person that the employer relies on for the economic production and the survival of theorganization. However adopting the sick role is a special form of deviant behaviour that issocially accepted according to Weiss and Lonnquist (2005).When Parson‟s (1975) sic model is applied to British Society there is a stark contrastbetween British citizens brought up with the National Health Service who are verycomfortable taking sick leave and who accept their entitlement to sickness benefit, andimmigrants who may not readily adopt the sick role for financial and cultural reasons. Butlimiting the use of Parsons‟ sick role model to his picture of the bureaucratic-rationalmodel of industrial society fails to take into account the survival of earlier conceptions, andother cultural legitimisations (or de-legitimisations) of the sick role. We need to recognisethat rationality itself is socially constructed, and people from other cultures, those whoseek spiritual healing and those who do not have access to medical doctors who can givethe illness a label (diagnosis), may see things differently. And when industrial societystarts to find medically-defined sickness too expensive, it may also start to use othercriteria to question its legitimacy.According to Wainwright and Calnan (2002) signing off sick has enabled people to opt outof their social responsibilities and in recent years there has been a drive by the Departmentof Health and the Department of Employment to encourage people who have been on longterm sickness benefits to return to work by offering financial incentives. People fromdeveloping countries, such as the Caribbean, are not used to the same luxury of being paid34