Patient and health care delivery systems in the US, Canada and Australia

This book is an ethnographic study, which examines the dialectical interplay between a large, impersonal managed care system and the activities of everyday multi-disciplinary practice conducted in health service organizations. The materiality of the managed care system and its connections to the clinical practice setting cannot easily be known. But the various ideological elements of this managed care system have a core structure associated with a new economic paradigm. Corporatist ideological discourses have gained some prominence in health care, affecting people practices and health care organization and suggesting this study. Three organizational accounts obtained from locales in Australia, Canada and the US are constructed as ethnographic texts. The accounts are representations of how corporatized belief systems ‘interpellate’, in various ways, everyday practices actions and behaviours. The accounts describe the diverse and complex ways in which organizational officials and multi-disciplinary practitioners know and experience everyday practice in the new economic environment...