ABSTRACT
Mothers, and most of the other adults who might normally represent a child, would seem to have done well out of the bureaucratic format. The idealization of staff's technical competence within the bureaucratic format had two distinctive features. First, this character was given quite unequivocally; expertise was displayed rather than proved. Second, this expertise had a 'collegial' rather than an individual character. Doctors were expert because they belonged to an expert profession. In this version, hospitals and clinics were staffed by a uniform body of professionals, each one competent and all with equal access to a standard body of medical knowledge. This chapter examines the procedures through which staff's expertise was idealized and the methods which dramatized the ignorant and subordinate status of the child's representative. It deals with an analysis of those situations which presented the greatest threat to staff's authority, and of the ways in which these challenges were overcome.
