Since the early 1980s there has been a remarkable growth in sociological studies of the body and in interdisciplinary work which has sought to resensitize social thought to the corporeal foundations of social action (Shilling 2005). Two broad theoretical perspectives have tended to dominate these analyses. On the one hand, certain writers have identified the governmental management of the body as setting key parameters to the overarching external environment in which social action occurs. Bryan Turner ([1984] 1996), for example, draws on Thomas Hobbes' and Talcott Parsons' concerns with the “problem of order” in order to identify the reproduction and regulation of populations through time and space, the restraint of desire, and the representation of bodies, as four key issues that face all societies. On the other hand, analysts have identified the body as central to the internal environment of social action. Arthur Frank (1991: 43), for example, examines the opportunities and constraints of action as given by the “problems of bodies themselves.” Such action-oriented studies typically develop by being attentive to “the body's own experience of its embodiment” and by drawing on interactionist, phenomenological, and existentialist resources provided by such figures as Georg Simmel and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Csordas 1994; Frank 1991: 48; Leder 1990).