Abstract: Existing studies on medical injury compensation often focus on institutional arrangement or financial outcomes. They are lack of sufficient attention to the micro-social processes that determine compensations, especially the tension between the different kinds of losses and the quantitative outcomes of resolution. Based on the fieldwork in a dispute resolution department of a public city hospital in northern China, this study presents the comprehensive medical injury compensation "pricing" processes under different channels. The paper argues that the crucial parts in medical injury disputes inevitably involve commensuration, a social process by which different factors are being quantified onto the same scale. By introducing the concept of commensurative practice, this study depicts the formation of compensation amounts as an accumulative process of multiple micro-based commensurative practices. The study finds that the commensurative practices in medical injury disputes are usually unfolded in three dimensions:value (integration of values), cognitive (simplification of information) and technical (accuracy of measurement). There are two factors affecting specific ways of commensuration that can cause dimensional shifts. On one hand, the less institutionalized the interaction context, the more prominent the value dimension in the commensurative practice, while the more institutionalized interaction context most likely results in more cognitive and technical commensuraition. On the other hand, the more directly commensurative practices target the "incommensurable" or "not easily commensurable" attributes, the more prominent the dimension of value commensuration, while the attributes of what is considered "commensurable" or "easily commensurable" are more often accompanied by cognitive and technical commensuration. The main focus of this study is to present as well as compare commensurative practices of "incommensurables" under the channels of different institutionalisation.

Key words: medical injury dispute, medical injury compensation, compensation, commensuration