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  • The formation of "managemen...
    Teig, Inger Lise

    Dialectical anthropology, 03/2015, Volume: 39, Issue: 1
    Journal Article

    This article examines how unitary management as a discourse of general management is able to permeate a psychiatric hospital through the management training program. The argument is that the management training program was a pervasive vehicle in reconstituting the "subjectivities" of those involved to the extent that it made the managers see themselves as the driving agents of the structural changes. The training program stressed the unitary managers' freedom as they assumed responsibility without being ordered to, were expected to evaluate their actions, and were told to continue improving their managerial practices. The individual manager was put in the fore and given the power to drive the changes in their professional-managerial role. The central focus is how senior managers' "managementhood" was constructed through training session meetings. Disagreements or oppositions to the program were refigured into administrative dilemmas by rephrasing disagreements as communication problems and by the interpellation to create "managementhood": "What will you do then?" The training program meetings are analyzed as technologies that operate within a "dispositif" in the sense that the meetings shape the range of possible actions and outcomes of the organization and they also serve to disseminate the key organizing metaphors through which the organization and its participants are to plan and implement their activities. Actual meetings get agents to commit themselves to the employment of the organizing metaphors of the general management discourse.