Socrates interrogates a slave who is destined to remain one. (Ranciére, 1991, s. 29)

The main purpose of this paper is to problematize dialogue, dialogism and person-centering between professionals and patients as a governmental rationality in contemporary healthcare context (Siouta, 2016). The concept of dialogue in education, as an ideal for face-to face relationships, has a long history in Western societies. It can be traced at least as far back as Plato’s Dialogues and the Socratic conversations (Englund, 2012). However, during recent decades the concept of dialogues has become a matter of course and a figure of thought in virtually all areas of society, not only in education, also for instance in health care, work life, career counselling, business marketing, european rural developement as well as in the formation of  political spaces as the European Union (Olsson, Peterson & Krejsler, 2014a; Siouta, 2016; Sundelin, 2016). In many of these contexts, dialogue as a practice is regarded as an ideal not only in terms of individuals, but also in terms of groups, organizations, communities and national as well as of transnational political spaces. You might even talk about a dialogical turn in society and that dialogism has been established as a dogma of the talking, writing and thinking in most areas of society. And, as Siouta (2016) emphasize, most of these kinds of dialogues occur within the context of institutional settings characterized by asymmetry power relationships. The dialogic turn can be seen as an expression of a profound political change in how we should perceive society, work, health care and education and of which we as individuals should be and become to be included in society. In this paper, we are not interested in dialogues from a traditional policy perspective, where issues such as objectives, results, resources and organization are in focus.  We are instead interested in the politics of dialogue, how the concept operate as a technology in the formation of narratives, in this case, about health care, health professionals, patients and of citizens (Ibid.). Our main interest is to problematize the governmental rationalities that permeate this narrative. In our analyses, we are playing with Focault’s concept of governmentality. We use “play” to signal that we are exploring governmentality as more or less a methodological approach to thinking about conditions that make the present possible, in this case, the formation of contemporary health care system, professionals and patients. This kind of analysis has the advantage that it does not require prior definition of for instance dialogue and person-centering (Foucault, 1994; Olsson, Petersson & Krejsler, 2014b). Instead, it enables us to study how these concepts and other floating signifiers acquire meaning within particular regimes of discourses and practices. Studies on governmentality pay particular attention to the relationships between governance, knowledge and political reasoning in relation to questions such as how to govern those who are expected to govern themselves, and how far to govern (Ibid.).

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