[The conflict of tomatoes and olive oil within a bureaucratic machinery]

In this short article, the author relates, by means of a case report, a type of conflict which occurs as a result of the paradoxes derived from the current managerial model practiced in the Andalucian public hospitals. The limitations and the incompetence of a bureaucracy, rigid in compliance with its functions, and which is incapable of attending to the demands that belong to the hard core of the organization, place the supposed most important and most immediate objectives of an efficient managerial system in "danger". The basic hypothesis lies in the need to bear in mind, at the time of designing a hospital's organizational system, the "structures of the invisible interests", with their corresponding paradoxes and perversions, of each of the distinct component parts of this system. And how these invisible bureaucratic interests can hinder and pervert managerial and organizational designs which appear to be ideal and optimal in their objectives and principles.