In the social sciences, we study phenomena that change while we are studying them. Being ourselves part of the phenomena we study, we researchers also change as our research objects change.

I began studying work teams in the early 1990s. The endeavor lasted approximately 15 years. This book is structured to reflect that journey. Instead of trying to construct a universal definition of “a good team,” I follow and analyze the historical transformation of work teams in their organizational and cultural contexts. At the same time, I document the transformation of my own understanding. Toward the end of the book, the notion of team fades into the background and a new notion, knotworking, steps into the center.

The research journey of this book takes the reader to visit teams in a variety of workplaces in Finland and the United States. It also crosses boundaries among disciplines, notably among education, communication, and organization studies.

Cultural-historical activity theory is the unifying thread of the book. This is a general framework that requires creation and employment of context-specific intermediate concepts and methods every time it is applied to a specific empirical case. These intermediate theoretical concepts and methods are in themselves important outcomes of the research.

The empirical chapters of this book have collaborative histories of their own. The first version of Chapter 3 was written with Dennis Mazzocco and presented as a paper at the conference of the International Communication Association in 1995.