As the idea of the learning organization is heavily infused with positive value, it becomes difficult for professionals to object. However, the empirical data indicates that the teachers take a clear negative view on the new organization, more precisely on imbalance between interdisciplinary work and subject specific work. Using the "critical approach" to analyze a learning organization, the teachers' negative talk can be seen as ordinary resistance to the organizational changes, a negative response that perhaps is caused by a desire to keep their professional territories, subgroups, independence and identity as well as their status, power and other privileges that come with being a "real teacher". It can also be interpreted as a desire to retain the old, in this case the traditional view, of the teacher's role, a kind of "identity lag" ([1] Abrahamsson, 2006). Nevertheless, we chose to see the resistance as signs of practical problems and learning gaps in the learning organization. The management driven changes introduced were done with the aim to make the school more efficient. However, at the same time the teachers experience that the conditions for their work has been deteriorated, especially so in regards to conditions for their learning, which signals unintended (and unwanted) consequences of the change.
Implementing a management concept such as a learning organization in a complex work organization such as a school, with its matrix of counteracting discourses, several autonomous occupational groups and specializations and a long history of coordination of generic learning and specific learning, seems to require a more multidimensional approach to be successful. Interestingly, the management identify management concepts such as single-dimensional interdisciplinary work teams as the way forward although there are many studies that point at problematic issues with such an approach. Our study reveals no simple solution but indicates that one possible step forward would be to include the teachers' different kinds of workplace learning when rebuilding the multidisciplinary teams. As far as we can see, this has not been done in the studied school organization. To conclude, in this article we show how the implementation of a governance concept (learning organization) in fact can be seen as bringing with it unintended consequences for the organization as a whole and especially for the professionals. Even within a work organization claiming to be a learning organization, learning gaps can be identified.
Last, this study boarder on the issue of professional identity, and for further studies it would be of interest to study professional identity in relation to changed organization of work.