Throughout Western Europe, psychiatric care has been subjected to 'modernisation' by the implementation of various managerial reforms in order to achieve improved mental health services. This paper examines how practitioners resist specific managerial reforms introduced in Finnish outpatient clinics and a child psychiatry clinic. The empirical study involves documentary research and semi-structured interviews with doctors, psychologists, nurses and social workers. The analysis draws on notions of Foucault's conception of resistance as subtle strategies. Three forms of professional resistance are outlined: dismissive responses to clinical guidelines; a critical stance towards new managerial models; and improvised use of newly introduced information and communications technologies (ICTs). Resistance manifests itself as moderate modifications of practice, since more explicit opposition would challenge the managerial rhetoric of psychiatric care which is promoted in terms of positive connotations of clientcentredness, users' rights, and the quality of the care. Therefore, instead of strongly challenging managerial reforms, practitioners keep them 'alive' and ongoing by continuously improvising, criticising and dismissing reforms' nonfunctional features. In conclusion it is suggested that managerial reforms in psychiatric care can only be implemented successfully if frontline practitioners themselves modify and translate them into clinical practice. The reconciliation between this task and practitioners' therapeutic orientation is proposed for further study.

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This article analyses the accomplishment of boundary work performed by professionals engaged in inter-agency collaboration. As a means of building authority within a particular field, boundary work is found to be a common feature of most professional practices. By analysing the talk of Finnish professionals who work in the field of supported housing in mental health, the article investigates the ways professionals -as collective representatives of their service -talk about doing boundary work when transferring their clients to another agency. The study drew on the principles of exploratory case study design and ethnomethodology. A key finding from the analysis of professionals' focus groups and team meetings indicated that boundary work is employed when disputes arise between supported housing and collaborating agencies. The article goes on to suggest that professionals accomplish boundary work by rhetorically presenting themselves as holders of "day-to-day evidence" of clients' mundane living skills and serious ill-health. The paper concludes by arguing that in inter-agency collaboration, boundary work building on day-to-day evidence is used to influence the decision on the most appropriate living arrangement for the client. Boundary work is also used for boosting the authority of professionals as representatives of a relatively new and fixed-term agency in the service system.

Across Western welfare regimes, policies emphasize that service users should have more choices regarding their services. This article examines how service choices are presented, responded to and decided in interactions between service users and professionals in mental health transition meetings. Choice is often associated with consumerist user involvement ideas, but in mental health choice also relates to democratic user involvement approach and to shared decision making between professionals and service users. The results of the study show that professionals construct service users as consumers by offering service options in choice making sequences, expecting users to make appropriate choices. Service users mostly act like consumers by responding to these choice options. However, the study also demonstrates that the professionals do not always accept the user' first choice but respond to them as non-preferred. Sometimes they also suggest choices on behalf of the users. In these 'non-accepting' sequences choices are negotiated in interaction between the parties, rather than users acting as autonomous choice makers. The sequences are based on two kinds of professional reasoning: first the professional-led needs assessment and second the structure of the service package that the user is being offered. This negotiation has elements of shared decision making and the 'logic of care'. But it also has elements of paternalist control which 2 challenge both consumerist and democratic service user involvement and suggests consideration of more collectively oriented service user actions.

This article develops the concept of 'ethics work' (Banks [2016] "Everyday Ethics in