The Eventmaker

This is the written account of research aimed at understanding and portraying the complexity of the dilemmas faced by the professionals running return-to-work programmes. It studies a set of tensions between managerialism, consumerism and professionalism. This research aims at revaluing the emotional and interactive consideration in in-practice decision making. The starting point is what happens/occurs in daily practice. This thesis is based on empirical research investigating the narrative knowledge of storytelling. An 'experiment' is carried out, in which the stories of professionals were fed back to the professionals as art, in order to examine not just arguments and rationality, but also the feelings and experience that the performance evoked. In this thesis there is a tension between an ethnographical voice, which describes an object (an organization and the interaction between clinicians and patients), a reflective voice, which reflects on issues such as managerialism, professionalism and client-centredness, as well as a poetic voice, which makes use of poetic truth emphasizing the artificial and constructed concept of language. The explicit use of art as a means to evoke reflexivity and storytelling can be seen as the creation of a self-contained, separate Event. The text is meant to underpin a reflection on the dedicated therapist searching for the confrontation with Otherness, examining what ordinarily goes unex-amined, looking for trouble and finding problems in seemingly unproblematic situations, in order to make a difference. The argument proceeds not by destroying the balance, but by carefully challenging the equilibrium. In order to facilitate an opening to a more sensitive approach to evidence-based practice, it is recommended that a therapist makes a difference and constructs events and provokes experiences, dialogue, and rich multi-voiced stories. This is the therapist as Eventmaker.