Incorporation and Individualization of Collective Voices: Public Service User Involvement and the User Movement’s Mobilization for Change

Service user involvement’ is a widespread and well-known phenomenon within welfare policy and practice in Western countries and is usually perceived as a way of improving welfare services to better aid service users in managing their predicaments. However, the presented ethnographical study of service user involvement within a Swedish psychiatry organization shows that user involvement initiatives might also result in unintended and undesired effects on the collective user movement (i.e. the service user organizations involved in the activities). The analysis suggests that initiatives on user involvement might affect both the constitution of the user movement as well as the way the movement operates. Theoretically co-optation theory informs the analysis.