This research is an ethnographic study of teamwork in a home health organization. Over a sixteen month period, participant observation techniques and interviews were used to provide a descriptive account of the way groups of nurses, social workers, therapists, and aides together define, organize, and provide health care services in a system based in the homes of patients.

The increase in specialization as a result of advances in medical technology, an expanding concept of health, and quality assurance imperatives that emphasize coordination and integration of services and programs, have led to the use of interoccupational approaches in the delivery of health services. Further, numerous social and economic factors have redirected the provision of health care services from the hospital to the home setting.

The previous research on interoccupational teamwork is largely prescriptive and rarely analytic or empirical. While the concept of teamwork in health care functioning had been vigorously promoted, little is known about its nature, utility, and validity. This exploratory study, grounded in the everyday social world of team members, furthers our understanding of interoccupational teamwork and caregiving in professional organizations. Its rich detail also provides insights into women's work groups, health care teamwork without physician leadership, and methodologically, the conduct of research from a superordinate membership position.

This report stresses a negotiated or interactionist approach to understanding behaviors, decisions, and relationships. It demonstrates how the composition and the configuration team groupings, the social organization of team member relations, including roles and the division of labor, and even the feelings that caregivers had about their work, were all negotiated among caregivers within organizational and public policy containers.

This research concludes with a summary of the salient dimensions of social life that emerged from this research that contribute to our understanding of teamwork, a discussion of several factors previously unaddressed in the sociological literature that encourage negotiative behavior, and questions regarding the appropriateness of both the interoccupational team formula and the medical structure as adequate guides in caregiving and home health functioning.