The standardization of the supply chain from dying to disposal: Interprofessional coordination in the area of the dead care

This paper focuses on the working chain around the corpse and its regulation. The governance of the funeral activity is here related to the negotiation between the funeral corporations, the health professions and the State. The paper explores the historic turning point of the development of embalming, and more fundamentally, the rising of dead care in funeral services (funeral home, display, embalmment), which stretch the bounds between the medical world and the funeral world. The analysis combines different points of view on this transition: - the central role of industrial actors to carry socio-technical innovation in funeral and, furthermore, the standardization of the care process of the deceased; - the intensification of the public action as vector of rules in the normalization of processes and equipments (tools, devices, spaces) ;- the rising power of the professional group of embalmers and funeral directors in constructing their hegemony on the funeral activity. Then, we see the central stake constituted by “dead care” as a socio-technical innovation: on one hand in the construction of boundaries between public sector and private sector; on the over hand in the expression of occupational competition between health professions and undertakers