ABSTRACT
The category ‘consumer’ has developed through historical conditions to the point that it now features prominently not only within the sphere of private market relations but within wider areas of public life, from health, education, welfare, to law and politics. While the literature using this concept is well established, the ‘health consumer’ construct has provoked intense and conflicting responses. In contrast to the claim that modern patients act in the manner expected of market consumers (Haug and Lavin 1983; Sawyer et al. 1994) theorists such as Lash and Urry (1994: 207-10) draw attention to the practical, structural and ideological differences that differentiate public sector organizations from the private sector – differences which are said to make it logically impossible for patients to conduct themselves as consumers. This argument has found some support at the everyday level of social and political experience. In a study on the conduct of patients attending an Australian general practice, Peter Lloyd (1991) and his associates found that traditional consumer behaviour has neither solidified into a set of routine social practices nor been established as a new mode of reasoning. In the concrete world of living actors, it appears that people continue to think and act in a manner consonant with traditional models of patienthood. Thus, the concept is dismissed in some quarters because it fails to describe accurately the actual behaviour of patients in the concrete setting of the hospital, the clinic or the general practitioner’s surgery.
