Dialectical irony functions as an act of emancipation and counter-discourse on managerial change in the Finnish public sector (Filander 2003). My aim is to identify the counter-discursive resources used by professionals in their fight against New Public Management. The meaning of the responsibility and collective identity in which professionals have earlier positioned themselves is changing into something profoundly different. I have analysed discourses of change through particularly selected key interviews that I call special cases or deviant cases. Discourses of truth linked with the development work promoting New Public Management were deconstructed with the help of irony. Examining such deviant cases is particularly necessary in a situation in which alternative perspectives have lost their legitimacy and in which counter-narratives can no longer be conveyed in their own terms.ReferencesFilander, K. (2003) Vocabularies of Change - Analysing Talk on Change and Agency in Developmental Work. Roskilde: Roskilde University Press.