Sociologists and socio-legal scholars have explored how social fields transform social problems, but have largely overlooked how social problems transform social fields. This research uses the contemporary U.S. opioid crisis as a case for examining how efforts to address a shared social problem have transformed the fields of healthcare and criminal justice. Based on interviews with healthcare providers and enforcement agents in California, findings demonstrate how the use of shared technology in the form of prescription drug monitoring programs paired with the encroachment of institutional logics from adjacent fields helps to reshape workers’ roles, routines, and relationships in ways that create opportunities for field-level change.

Elizabeth Chiarello, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University. She is a medical sociologist and socio-legal scholar who focuses on institutional influences on frontline work, intersections among organizational fields, and social movement consequences. Her work has been published in several top sociological and socio-legal journals and she has received awards from multiple sections of the American Sociological Association.

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