The thesis wants to focus on how the public administration is trying to organize citizens based on a management mentality that is shaped by the fact that health is truth. At the same time, the thesis wants to focus on how the importance and the consequence of management mentality help to construct certain citizens, and, thus this thesis wants to focus on and challenge the positions that the citizens have.
The aim of the thesis is to create a knowledge-political intervention in order to expand the frontiers of the way healthcare is understood, which will challenge the knowledge discipline that health, is a part of. The thesis therefore contributes - in academic terms - to create a stir in the understanding of health, the management mentality established, and hence the positions that will be established in relation to the citizen.
The framework for the thesis is based on the genealogy which is about writing the story of today. The way genealogy is applied is understood as a knowledge-political intervention and has a focus on identifying and illuminating inconvenient facts. The use of genealogy as a knowledge-political intervention affects the theoretical framework chosen to support the possibility of writing a different history of health.
With a result of genealogy and with concepts as pastoral power, knowledge, power and subject, the thesis can conclude that the public administration is largely trying to organize citizens’ action by management mentality. That happens by presenting health as truth, which helps to reduce the citizen positions in relation to health. The truth is undisputedly presented based on certain factors about what health is, and how healthcare should be done. The discourse – health as truth – therefore leads to a direct claim for the citizen to be healthy both for the individual and the public good.
Pastoral power as a control mentality becomes particularly evident when the government puts up to or encourages individuals to change their behaviour, and, thus, gets individuals to adopt and embed health as truth as their own goals or own truth. Pastoral power functions are being controlled from a distance, and the goal is that it is the citizens who must change themselves.
Therefore the positions that are available for citizens can be roughly characterized as to be loyal to themselves and the community by choosing health or deselect this and thus risk being marginalized. Simultaneously, the thesis also displays that some citizens have the ability to choose different positions of subjects to a greater or lesser extent by adding other discourses greater value than the discourse on health as truth.