About BRINT | News About BRINT | Help & FAQs | Contact Us | Advertise Here |
Welcome to the World's No. 1 Resource for Business Technology Management and Knowledge Management

Services: Knowledge Portals · Knowledge Map · Knowledge Network · Book of Knowledge · NEWS· INFORMATION Channels: General Business · Business Technology · E-Business · Knowledge Management Community: Join the Network! · Global Network · Events Calendar · Executive Jobs	SEARCH [HELP]

This document presents a short critique of the Coordination Theory postulated by Malone & Crowston (1993).

Coordination theory is about the interdisciplinary study of coordination. Coordination can be defined as "the process of managing dependencies between activities." The development of coordination theory would require characterization of the various kinds of dependencies and identifying the coordination processes that can be used to manage them. A variety of such processes identified by the authors include those for managing shared resources, producer / consumer relationships, simultaneity constraints, and task / subtask dependencies. Their theory's focus is on ways of applying a "coordination perspective" in three different domains:

• Understanding the effects of IT on human organizations and markets,
• Designing of cooperative work tools, and,
• Designing Distributed and Parallel Processing Computer Systems.

Coordination theory refers to theories about how coordination can occur in diverse kinds of systems. The current status of this "theory" is more like a collection of analogies, scattered results, and partial frameworks.

The issues relevant to IS include CSCW & groupware, and IT-enabled global interdependencies among network organizations because of reduced coordination costs. For instance, understanding the new forms of organizing enabled by IT and IT- enabled coordination structures. The questions that the authors ask include: Are there fundamental coordination processes that occur in all coordinated systems ? Is it possible to characterize situations in a way that helps generate and choose appropriate (?) coordination mechanisms for them?

By providing illustrations from economics, organization theory, computer science and task assignment, the authors illustrate the coordination processes that have been analyzed in various contexts: managing shared resources (including task assignments), managing producer / consumer relationships (including prerequisites and usability constraints), managing simultaneity constraints, and managing task / subtask relationship. The key point they try to emphasize is that concepts of coordination theory can help identify similarities among concepts and results in different disciplines. They argue that the identification of such similarities would facilitate the cross-fertilization of ideas across disciplines.

They argue that their definition of coordination implies that "all instances of coordination include actors performing activities that are interdependent." However, they note that there is no single "right" way to identify these components of coordination in a given situation.

They emphasize the effects of IT on organizations and markets (apparently guided by the technological imperative). They identify various "orders" of such effects because of reduced coordination costs. First order effects relate to substitution of human coordination by IT-based coordination. Second order effects relate to increased use of overall amount of coordination. Third order effects relate to shift toward more "coordination- intensive" structures. They provide illustrations from the recent work on two specific questions about the effect of IT on organizations and markets:

• How will IT affect the size of the organization? (market transactions vs. internal decision-making with firms)
• How will IT affect the degree of centralization and decentralization? (centralized vs. decentralized managerial decisions)

Malone, Yates & Benjamin (1987) concluded that by reducing the costs of coordination, IT may lead to an overall shift toward smaller firms and proportionately more use of markets - rather than internal decisions within firms - to coordinate economic activity. Econometric analyses of overall US economy for 1975- 1985 appears to support this argument (Brynjolfsson et al. 1994). Gurbaxani & Whang (1991) have argued that IT would lead to more centralization if it primarily reduces decision information costs, and to more decentralization if it primarily reduces agency costs. For CSCW, the authors suggest applications of Coordination theory in (a) Using coordination concepts from other disciplines to suggest design ideas; (b) Developing a taxonomy of cooperative work tools; and (c) Analyzing incentives for using cooperative tools such as GDSS and groupware.

Criticism of Coordination Theory - lacks issues of processual issues, specifically those of context and time (Information Systems Research Special Issue, March 1996, 7(1)). The causal links suggested by the authors are challenged by Winter & Taylor (1996 ISR) since such modes of organization had existed long before the appearance of IT in its current form (Campbell & Kelly 1996 ISR). They argue that the causal relationship must take into account social and economic factors in studying the relationships. Coopersmith's (1996 ISR) analysis of the influence of facsimile transmission (or faxing) on the political organizing process in Texas also illustrates the limitations of technological determinism and emphasizes the importance of patterns of information technology use in transforming organizations and organizing.

References: Malone, T. & Crowston, K. The Interdisciplinary Study of Coordination, MIT Sloan Technical Report/Working Paper, November 1993.