The concept of boundary work has been applied to understand professionals’ responses to new organizational initiatives. Embedded herein lies a change perspective. However, the change process itself has remained implicit and thus under-theorized as context for professionals’ boundary work. In order to address this gap, this study draws on an ethnographic study of a temporary breakdown in a process of reorganizing from functional units to interprofessional teams in Danish municipal healthcare. The findings point to an intertwining process of sensemaking and boundary work. The analysis reveals that the professional groups of nurses and care workers were struggling to make sense of working in an interprofessional team from a shared team office space. In response, they drew on defensive boundary work practiced through negative emotional doings and sayings. The nurses, as the higher status group, in particular worked to reinstate symbolic boundaries in the team office which was enacted as a space for demarcation rather than collaboration. This defensive boundary work in turn hindered the professionals in restoring sense and enacting the change. The study offers three contributions to boundary work research: 1) a theoretical framework for explaining how and why boundary work is intertwined with professionals’ sensemaking during organizational change, 2) a theorization of the change process as context for boundary work and the reciprocity of this relationship, and 3) providing empirical foundation of the socio-material and emotional aspects boundary work.
