In Part II, chapters 2-7, I explored the lived experiences of workers and service users at Southville Community Mental Health Team (CMHT) and then the Rehabilitation and Recovery Team (RRT). I briefly noted how situational logics and the strategic directional tendencies they generate shaped people's ideas and actions within this setting. In Part III, the next two chapters of the book, I will bring the concepts of situational logic, strategic directional tendency and the wider theoretical framework of Emergentist Marxism (EM) into closer focus. In the current chapter, I begin with a comprehensive overview of EM, including an account of political economy and the labour process as a basis for exploring the interplay of structure, culture and agency within mental health services. This provides a foundation from which the role of situational logics in shaping strategic directional tendencies in mental health services can be explained.

Before I begin this overview of EM, I will briefly outline the argument to be developed over the course of the chapter. I propose that the organisational landscape of public services is reshaped over time according to the needs of capital through processes of subsumption. However, due to the partial and uneven nature of subsumption, aspects of past conjunctural settlements remain embedded in the present in the form of multiple, sedimented material structures and ideational frameworks. Consequently, repurposed ‘remnants’ of older welfare settlements (such as biomedical models and custodialism) endure alongside newer emergent features (for example, informational practice systems and individual responsibilisation). As practitioners and service users navigate this uneven and differentiated terrain, the alignments and frictions between novel emergent and sedimented features create situational logics that play a crucial role in shaping and conditioning which types of practice and forms of knowledge are enacted and articulated. Within community mental health services, the dominant situational logic under neoliberalism generates ‘strategic directional tendencies’ towards biomedical residualism and custodial paternalism. However, these directional tendencies also engender resistance. Consequently, a ‘countervailing directional tendency’ towards ethico-political professionalism is also visible within this setting.

Political economy and levels of scale

EM is a theoretical framework that draws on, but significantly adapts, Archer's (1995) morphogenetic/ morphostatic (M/ M) model.