ABSTRACT
Myths are institutionalized and widely spread norms and recipes about appropriate, legitimate organizing – such as what kinds of formal structures, technologies, processes, procedures and ideologies a modern organization should contain. Thus, a myth is a socially legitimated recipe for how to design part of an organization. It is an idea which excites, grabs attention and has achieved exemplary status in several organizations. Organizational fashions, like other fashions, may go out of style and vanish, while new fashions arrive. Myths as fashions also illustrates a central point made by J. G. March and J. P. Olsen in their ‘garbage can’ model, whereby solutions seek problems rather than the opposite, as is the case for instrumental perspectives. Myths are often expressed in more or less clear recipes for how to build an organization. The definition above emphasizes that each recipe merely prescribes how certain parts of an organization should be designed.
