Fieldwork in formal organizations often involves encountering a myriad of versions of how complex phenomena are supposed to look like, and work. This has surely been the case in my own projects, involving mainly ethnographic work in hospitals and municipalities in Norway. A significant change in the way models of the social life in these organizations interact, overlap and influence each other has occurred over the last two or three decades. During this period, I have noticed that old and new models of justice, rationality, quality etc. only rarely replace each other, but overlap in complex ways.
