ABSTRACT
This chapter considers about how in psychiatric hospitals, persons with diverse psychiatric ideologies can manage to work together. At such a hospital, the physicians are principally concerned with organizing treatment for patients, while nurses and aides are concerned both with achieving manageable wards and with significant involvement in therapeutic activities. The patients themselves seek to manage their sick selves and their institutionalized lives. Central administration gives a certain impetus to prevailing notions of shape, both by its general conception of how each ward relates to the others and by its publication of a few rules for each ward. Clearly the sociologist must examine rules within a rhetorical framework, regarding them as historical pronouncements, usable in future situations. Rules enter into current and future conduct in that actors define rules as relevant to situations, which means that they must define situations as related or unrelated to specific governing rules.
