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The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the relevance of psychoanalysis to an emerging sub-field known as “critical healthcare management studies” (CHMS).

Building upon a wave of critical scholarship in the broader field of management, scholars and practitioners of healthcare management have begun to forge a critical scholarly movement of their own. CHMS, short for “critical healthcare management studies,” formally denotes a new subfield of inquiry dedicated to challenging entrenched assumptions, exposing power relations, and cultivating critical praxis, all the while serving as a vital counterpoint to mainstream scholarship. This paper seeks to augment the CHMS movement with psychoanalysis, and particularly the critical vein of organizational psychoanalysis already well-established in critical management studies.

The argument is made that a greater engagement with psychoanalysis offers novel avenues for critical theorizing and practice in healthcare management. Specifically three areas are considered: 1) the exploitative role of guilt in the caring professions, 2) the resurgence of authoritarianism and its implications for unconscious organizational dynamics, and 3) the potential for a psychoanalytically informed critical healthcare praxis.

While there remain wide differences of opinion about the utility of psychoanalysis outside of the clinical arena, this paper reveals just how psychoanalysis can inform today's healthcare organizations, and more broadly the social and political organization of health in society.

While critical approaches have enriched research in proximate fields, their impact has been less marked in studies of healthcare management. In response, the 2016 Organizational Behaviour in Health Care Conference hosted its first-ever session dedicated to the emergent field of critical healthcare management studies (CHMSs). The purpose of this paper is to present five papers selected from that conference.

In this introductory paper, the authors frame the contributions as “green shoots” in a field of CHMS which contains four main furrows of activity: questioning the taken-for-granted; moving beyond instrumentalism; reflexivity and meanings in research; and challenging structures of domination (Kitchener and Thomas, 2016). The authors conclude by presenting an agenda for further cultivating the field of CHMS.

The papers evidence the value of CHMS, and provide insight into the benefits of broadening theoretical and methodological approaches in pursuit of critical insights.

CHMS works to explicate the multiple and competing ideologies and interests inherent in healthcare. As pragmatic imperatives push the provision of health and social care out of the organisational contexts and into private space, there is a particular need to simultaneously understand, and critically interrogate, the implications of new, as well as existing, forms of care.

This paper reviews, frames and details practical next steps in developing CHMS. These include: enhanced engagement with a wider range of actors than is currently the norm in mainstream healthcare management research; a broadening of theoretical and methodological lenses; support for critical approaches among editors and reviewers; and enhanced communication of critical research via its incorporation into education and training programmes.

The paper contributes to an emerging stream of CHMS research, and works to consolidate next steps for the field.