title: Health planning as context-dependent language play.
abstract: The concept of planning as context-dependent language play is proposed as a heuristic device to overcome shortcomings which are traced to the planner centered, means-end and prescriptive orientations of much of the existing literature on health planning. The model proposed suggests that planning should be analysed not simply in terms of the capacities and/or responsibilities that it claims to assign to planners, but also in the way that different planning discourses are mobilized, for strategic effect, by a range of other players in front-stage and back-stage settings. Within this conception, a planning exercise comes to be seen as an episode in dramas which have been running for extended periods of time. What distinguishes planning episodes from others in these dramas, is not simply the entry of players designated as planners, but also the discourses that both planners and other players mobilize as they attempt to structure and contest their relationships with one another. The implications of what this conception of planning holds for future research are then discussed.
authors.affiliation: Centre for Hospital Management and Information Systems Research, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.
authors.forename: P
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Degeling
mesh_terms: D001315:Australia; D003659:Decision Making, Organizational; D004324:Drama; D006285:Health Planning / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D011209:Power, Psychological