[Psychosocial management in medicine: a question of "management bias"?]

It was Roth (1962) who first coined the term "management bias". This term served to brand a pervasive, uncritical identification of the social scientist's perspective in his research projects in medicine, with the problem definition of the medical orderer of research. Instead of unbiased findings he thus tended to affirm administrative categories, Roth argued. I will try to point out that problems like "management bias" are not exclusive to psychosocial science, but they may as well be found in the realm of psychosocial care. The chronically ill became more and more important as a person(ality) during the ongoing process of technical perfection of medical treatment. The intensively, technically supported medical treatment produces within its demands towards the patient and his social context a kind of "human failure", that is, the patient tends to not fulfill the highly demanding treatment tasks. Within psychosocial care, failure will rather be attributed to the personality or family pathology instead of the institutional setting, and in that way the scientific patterns of biased attribution will be repeated, thus revealing "management bias", thus supporting the institution's interest of not being blamed for failure. I'll describe the dynamics of the "management bias" and briefly point out aspects to overcome it.