Coordination in Organizations

“Coordination” is a broad and colourful but not a well defined concept, though everybody has some idea of its meaning. For a long time questions of coordination played a role in many scientific fields, such as economics, cybernetics (Mesarovic et al. 1970) or organization theory (see Malone et al. 1991 for an overview). Physiologists speak of coordination in the context of body movements, while psychologists have in mind cognition or perception processes. Management science would refer to human work or decision processes. One of the main stimuli for drawing the attention of computer scientists to questions of coordination was the work of Winograd and Flores (Winograd and Flores 1986). Coordination as a research topic reached a culmination point with the establishment of the Center for Coordination Science, directed by Thomas W. Malone, at the MIT in 1990. Malone and Rockart within the Epilogue of this book access the impacts of IT and computer networking specifically on marketing and organizational strategies of large corporate organizations.