ABSTRACT
The interaction between meetings and documents is in a very basic sense routinely institutionalized in the administrative world of contemporary organizations, such as the interaction of agendas–meetings–minutes. Few researchers have studied in what ways this institutionalization occurs, however. Here we focus on a collaborative youth care project to illustrate one case of such an interaction. Ideas about creating order through a document deriving from one organization (the project) were met with resistance from the collaborating organization’s partners. The result was an ongoing document struggle involving competition among different organizations’ documents, ownership of various documents, and a division of labor pertaining to documents. These struggles were acted out in meetings and generated new meetings, in parallel with a process in which the involved professionals devoted less and less time to their core task: meeting their clients. We argue that such conflicts may propel the administrative Eigendynamik: it spins around itself in a self-preserving fashion, spiraling administration as a result of meetings and documents generating each other through the tension of collaborating organizations’ competing interests.
