IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/socmed/v51y2000i2p209-222.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Talking contracts and taking care: managers and professionals in the British National Health Service internal market

Author

Listed:
  • Griffiths, Lesley
  • Hughes, David

Abstract

This paper draws on audio-recordings of a Health Authority's contract monitoring meetings with hospital providers to examine the nature of interactions between managers and clinical professionals in the British National Health Service internal market. It describes how managers and professionals arrive at a working division of labour, which acknowledges their respective spheres of expertise, but also leaves a space where definitions are contested. There is an interplay of competing managerial and professional discourses which construct problems and proposed solutions in fundamentally non-commensurable ways. Yet only rarely do managers or professionals mount challenges in ways that bring them on to the territory of the other group; rather each group seeks to frame problems to mesh with its special domain of competence. Managers seek to push back the boundaries of professional control by constructing a language and set of practices which will govern the contracting process. But they remain reliant on professionals to mediate between the requirements of contracting and the realities of clinical work. Clinical arguments continue to have high perceived legitimacy for managers, and will often be taken up by hospital managers in negotiations with their Health Authority counterparts. It is argued that the dependency of managers on professionals to make the contracting system work, taken together with the continued social and cultural authority of senior medical consultants, limits managers' ability to control professionals.

Suggested Citation

  • Griffiths, Lesley & Hughes, David, 2000. "Talking contracts and taking care: managers and professionals in the British National Health Service internal market," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 51(2), pages 209-222, July.
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:51:y:2000:i:2:p:209-222
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277-9536(99)00448-7
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Jones, Lorelei & Fulop, Naomi, 2021. "The role of professional elites in healthcare governance: Exploring the work of the medical director," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 277(C).
    2. Stevens, Peter & Harper, David J., 2007. "Professional accounts of electroconvulsive therapy: A discourse analysis," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 64(7), pages 1475-1486, April.
    3. Jones, Lorelei & Exworthy, Mark & Frosini, Francesca, 2013. "Implementing market-based reforms in the English NHS: Bureaucratic coping strategies and social embeddedness," Health Policy, Elsevier, vol. 111(1), pages 52-59.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:51:y:2000:i:2:p:209-222. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/315/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.