The social production of commitment in hard times: first responders, emergency physicians, and forensic doctors in Colombia ; La producción social del compromiso en tiempos difíciles: socorristas, médicos de urgencias y forenses ; A produção social do compromisso em tempos difíceis: socorristas, médicos de urgência e médicos forenses na Colômbia

This article proposes a sociology of commitment in hard times, based on the experience lived during the 1980s and 1990s by a group of professionals whose work was carried out on the front line of attention to the bodily effects of armed violence – relief, emergency hospital care and forensic medical expertise – in the urban centres with the highest demographic and institutional concentration in Colombia – Bogota, Medellin, and Cali. In this context, how did these individuals adapt to their respective jobs? To what extent does the formation of a commitment to certain common causes help to explain the maintenance and transformation of immediate care work? This article also hopes to shed new light on the social, political and health situation that the country went through at that time, characterized not only by a crisis of armed violence but also of legitimacy and political-institutional precariousness: if the focus has mostly been on the critical horizon of collapse and chaos, empirical studies explaining the processes of social and institutional recomposition in these difficult times are still lacking. A qualitative and inductive perspective is therefore adopted here. An original oral corpus is examined according to the processes of codification, saturation, categorization and progressive problematization, and a triangulation of the resulting data with a diverse set of written sources is carried out. The richness of the oral corpus lies mainly in its content and testimonial value. These particularities have been captured through the tools of a certain interactionist and pragmatic sociology. Thus, the complexity and variations over time of the adaptation of individuals to their respective jobs of immediate attention have been revealed. Above all, it has been shown that the emergence of certain modalities of firm commitment in the face of the ravages of armed violence, aimed at underpinning professional values, adapting, and transforming care services and nurturing public debate, has laid the foundations of a ...