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In a community mental health center which stressed professional colleagueship and deemphasized administrative power, unilateral use of authority presented recurring, contingent crises. Two episodes are compared and analyzed to reveal negotiation as the primary mechanism of controlling equals and to indicate collective behavior as an alternative course toward negotiated order when routine channels of communication are blocked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior studies and commonsense definitions of the decision-making process suggest that the ascriptive power of the commitment offense, gravity of the commitment offense, psychiatric characteristics of the offender, and the social identity given off by the offender's family would be causally related to variance in the deviance label, i.e., decisions to commit to a mental hospital rather than to a corrections institution. Case records from both settings were analyzed for traces of the decision. However, controlling for each of the alternative variables fails to eliminate the strong relationship between intensity of the offender's prior career of delinquent behavior and the formal deviance label qua type of commitment. The multivariate path model suggests that delinquency intensity and type of commitment are the two most important determinants of mental classification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]