Abstract

In this article, changes in the content of the job advertisements of pharmacies are analyzed. The profession in focus in these advertisements is the pharmacist, a profession with a long history. The job advertisements are for positions at pharmacies in a Swedish context between 1903 and 2013. By using a theoretical framework including both new institutional theory and cultural theory, shifts in how pharmacies and professionals are presented can be described. The results indicate that the identities of the organizations in the pharmacy sector simultaneously relate to similar social and cultural dimensions. Therefore, organizational identity and institutional logics seem to evolve dynamically whereby the professional logic seems to be recurrently important while other logics seem to be important to various degrees and for certain lengths of time. In other words, neither organizational identity nor institutional logics are static. Instead, different constellations of logics are fashionable at different periods of time, which legitimizes certain ways of presenting the pharmacy.