Professionalism and the erosion of rationality in the health care field.

Abstract

This paper poses some fundamental, and therefore naive, questions about the purposes health care delivery systems should serve, and it analyzes the discrepant purposes our current systems do serve. After considering some general propositions from the sociology of organizations, and then some derived propositions bearing specifically on the roles of professionals today, it argues that professional dominance tends to produce results that are dysfunctional in terms of the purposes health care delivery systems should serve, and explores implications of these general dilemmas in the mental health field.