ABSTRACT
The deinstitutionalisation of mental health care has changed care delivery systems. Professional care is increasingly delivered in home spaces. Based on a discursive interaction study of worker–client dialogues during home visits, this chapter makes visible the situational processes whereby advice is given to strengthen the self-governance of clients in the preferred manner and the subject positions created, accepted and resisted. Clients occasionally accept advice and display the suggested way of improving their self-governance but also resist advice by asserting own competence, self-knowledge and knowledge of norms, thereby agreeing with the suggested future course of action but disagreeing about how to get there. Overt resistance to advice includes questioning the relevance of the recommendation and thus also implicit norms of how to live life. Hence, while self-knowledgeable subjects are produced in these situational processes, it does not necessarily result in change in subjectivities according to the specific form of governmental rationality characterising the setting.
