Kommunal organisering, ledelse og endring: En casestudie av implementering av psykiske helsetjenester i en norsk kommune1

The chapter studies one municipality in the process of implementing the Mental Health Action Plan over a 12-year period. The research questions are whether implementation compelled the municipality to change its service delivery organisation, whether management and management roles changed, and if so, how? The data is 21 individual interviews with managers and professionals in the municipality. The chapter shows how the municipality established a mental health service integrated into the unit for home care services for elderly people, yet management at different levels did not include tasks aimed at enabling the services to cooperate, and this created conflict in the relations between them. Implementation of NPM made the conflict worse. More management positions were established in order to facilitate more tasks. The new positions, however, focussed on internal organisational processes, and the conflict was not resolved until the mental health unit was separated from the home care service unit, thus creating two independent organisations that could cooperate in a quasi-market – the operative tool being money.