In sociological work of an empirical nature the concept of control tends to have a taken-for-granted quality. Similarly in the field of medical sociology when control is mentioned in relation to health and illness it is often presented in a unidimensional manner. This article analyses the relationship between control and responsibility for health in the lay accounts of male Glaswegians. Activist and fatalist dimensions were found in their thinking. However, activist thinking was seen to have three strands: personal activism, social activism, and religious activism. Further, fatalistic thinking was not about passive submission but rather the belief that control lay outwith the person in the realm of the social, natural or supernatural worlds. These findings demonstrate the subtle ways in which people relate to issues of control and responsibility in the health realm – a subtlety which is not fully brought out either in the theoretical or empirical work of social scientists researching in the health field.
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