Teamwork: Fashion or Institution?

Abstract

The phenomenon of fashion may have better potential to explain organizational change than existing theories of adaptation or selection. Fashion highlights new ideas of organizing while it degrades the existing ones as outdated. The present study illustrates the concept of fashion by the process through which traditional supervisory roles have been deinstituionalized and defined as outdted, while different forms of teamwork were endorsed as new, albeit temporary practices. The context is a series of reform programmes in Swedish working life for a three-decade period when different ideas of teamwork were discussed, tried or modified in relation to the existing ideas of organizing, such as supervisory roles. The article concludes that the fashion process needs to be taken seriously, especially when the process of change involves challenge to existing ideas and practices of organizing.