Abstract
Purpose: Cooperation between organizations is an often-suggested remedy for handling unsolved borderland problems. However, actual projects aiming at cooperation are seldom very successful. The purpose here is to highlight obstacles related to cooperation between different organizations based on a case study of a rehabilitation project where health care and several social service organizations (social insurance, social welfare, and the local employment agency) were involved. Data were gathered through participation and interviews. Findings: It seems that efficient cooperation requires an understanding of the participating organizations’ differences in work logic as well as work practices. Furthermore, only certain fairly standardized “normal” problems may be handled through organized cooperation while non-routine exceptional problem requires a more fully integrated work organization. Implications: Obstacles to cooperation are highlighted and ways to improve the possibilities of cooperation between organizations are suggested although such possibilities are generally hampered by differences in work logic.
Highlights
The notion of “cooperation” is here used to denote that the actual work tasks are performed together at the operational level while “coordination” refers to the intellectual planning for the common activities that different people or groups perform—with the intention to combine different competences into an integrated wholeness
Within the public sector there has been recurring demands for increased inter-organizational cooperation between health care and various social services and several projects have been launched over the years— none of them have been very successful they have provided enhanced insights in the obstacles to cooperation
As a well-known early project of cooperation between primary health care, social services and hospitals [5], it was noted that cultural work logic created some problems— mainly because the “acute care” mind-set of hospital employees tended to take over and hamper the possibility of cooperation with both primary care and service agencies
Summary
The notion of “cooperation” is here used to denote that the actual work tasks are performed together at the operational level while “coordination” refers to the intellectual planning for the common activities that different people or groups perform—with the intention to combine different competences into an integrated wholeness. Within the public sector there has been recurring demands for increased inter-organizational cooperation between health care and various social services and several projects have been launched over the years— none of them have been very successful they have provided enhanced insights in the obstacles to cooperation. The problems described in that study were mainly related to differences in values and goals, lack of flexibility in routines and reward systems, and economic restrictions with a narrow focus on each specific organization. These problems do not seem to have diminished over the years because later project studies have confirmed that the problems encountered are clashing cultures, such
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