ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses principal questions regarding the relationship between different market actors, such as public and private providers, users and their families. There is ambivalence among the generosity and restrictiveness of the welfare state, the 'free play' of the market, and the user's legitimate or non-legitimate wishes and requests for public services. The chapter discusses these ambivalences and points out tensions among the actors. It draws on Foucault's concept of governmentality, a concept that has been explicated as 'the conduct of conduct'. A shift in service orientation from patient to customer and a shift in governmentality in the assistive technologies (AT) market from utility to usability might contribute to facilitate societal processes directed at reconstituting disabled bodies as active agents and not as 'inferior bodies stripped of agencies'. The establishment of the first assistive technology centre (ATC) in Norway in Telemark in 1979 represented an initial break with the medical model and a 'pure' clinical service orientation in Norway.
