The slow progress in providing community-based care for mentally ill people and thus closing large psychiatric institutions has been well researched and documented. The enquiries have typically sought to demonstrate the gap between national policy intent and reality and have highlighted the structural, financial and organisational barriers to achieving new forms of service provision. Equally, an important recent study has shown that there are marked intra-Britain differences in how the assumed unitary national policy is interpreted and implemented. There is general agreement that the present ‘statutory framework’ inhibits radical service change and, furthermore, that centralised planning, joint-working, joint-planning mechanisms are flawed and underpinned by a poorly formulated financial and manpower strategy. Some management ‘process’ factors have also been isolated such as the presence/absence of clear leadership and ‘committed local champions of change’. The issue of ‘interprofessional tensions’ has been only briefly alluded to, with even less recognition of how the other powerful organisational groups interrelate. Certainly, there has been little ethnographic detail of how these tensions between dominant groups are played out at a local level or indeed impinge on local decision-making and progress. More typically, existing accounts of the closure of the large institutions have had a structuralist bias, with more emphasis upon the impact of regional and national policy and on the machinery of collaboration than on internal politics or the effects of local power relations.