"TO CREATE A FLOW OF PATIENTS": CATEGORIZATION PROCESSES IN NORWEGIAN PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL

Abstract

The article is based on the ethnography of the patient flow system in a Norwegian state psychiatric hospital. The emphasis on the flow of patients in the psychiatric institution demonstrates a shift in administration to a more procedural model and to the organization of technology and practices of local managers and medical staff, which is also manifested in terminology. The article examines how the patient flow metaphor produces and makes natural a certain type of structural dynamics of power through its categories and its structural process. In the frameworks of organizational institutionalism and sociology of professions, conflicts between managers and professionals have often been studied as conflicts between different institutional logics or conflicts between professionalism and managerialism. This article argues that the procedural logic introduced in the hospital under study and in the Norwegian health care system in general veils, among others, the problem of impossibility for professionals to abandon the "flows" terminology as a dominant one. The organizational processes introduced for health workers act as mandatory and invariable conditions for adequate organization of mental health care.