A fragile achievement: the production, sustainability and complicity of cooperation in organizations
Cooperation is central to organizational life, but it is not a fixed or uniformly positive phenomenon. This dissertation examines how workplace cooperation is established, sustained, and transformed across different organizational settings.
The findings show that workplace cooperation rests less on formal rules than on the relationships and reciprocity between colleagues. At the organizational level, cultural conditions are more central to how employees experience cooperation than structural conditions. In particular, reinforcing a shared purpose is an important condition for different forms of cooperation.
Cooperation also changes over time. In project work, it rises and falls with the different phases of a project rather than remaining steady. When teams are too new to have developed their own team culture, organizational structure can temporarily hold cooperation together until that culture takes shape. These findings show that cooperation depends on conditions that can change as work, teams, and organizational arrangements change.
The dissertation also examines what happens when cooperation does not produce positive organizational outcomes. Cooperation can function smoothly while simultaneously contributing to organizational decline. In the cases examined, structural change sets decline in motion, while organizational culture carries it forward through a shift in norms. Cooperation can therefore remain effective as a form of coordination even as the practices it supports become damaging.
Across the four studies, the dissertation shows that cooperation is fragile: it holds only as long as the conditions that sustain it are actively maintained. Understanding cooperation therefore requires attention to the relational, cultural, structural, temporal, and normative conditions through which cooperation is established, maintained, and redirected.