ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with an examination of the behavior of physicians in provincial hospitals in Thailand. Specifically, the structure of incentives facing physicians is quite different from that which faces administrative officials, and the distribution of power in a hospital is very different from that in a district office. The chapter aims to compare the structural position of physicians to that of district officials and describes the character of Thai medical professionalism. The power of the physicians is based both on their command of a scarce resource, namely their skill, from which they could easily earn a living outside of the civil service and on professional norms of autonomy and collegiality. An important difference between the incentive pattern of physicians and that of district officials was the importance that the physicians gave to the opportunity afforded by a civil service career for the exercise of their technical skills.
