Thomas W. Malone,
Kevin Crowston
An earlier version of this chapter appeared as T. W. Malone and K. Crowston (1994), The interdisciplinary study of coordination, ACM Computing Surveys 26 (March): 87-119. 1994 ACM. Reprinted by permission.
In recent years there has been a growing interest in questions about how the activities of complex systems can be coordinated (e.g., Huberman 1988b; Johansen 1988; Rumelhart et al. 1986; Winograd and Flores 1986; NSF-IRIS 1989; NSF 1991; Bond and Gasser 1988; Huhns and Gasser 1989). In some cases this work has focused on coordination in parallel and distributed computer systems; in others, on coordination in human systems; and in many cases, on complex systems that include both people and computers.
Our goal in this chapter is to summarize and stimulate development of theories that can help with this work. This new research area—the interdisciplinary study of coordination—draws upon a variety of different disciplines including computer science, organization theory, management science, economics, linguistics, and psychology. Many of the researchers whose efforts can contribute to and benefit from this new area are not yet aware of each other's work. Therefore, by summarizing this diverse body of work in a way that emphasizes its common themes, we hope to help define a community of interest and to suggest useful directions for future progress.
There is still no widely accepted name for this area, so we will use the term coordination theory to refer to theories about how coordination can occur in diverse kinds of systems. We use the term ''theory''with some hesitation because it connotes to some people a degree of rigor and coherence that is not yet present in this field. Instead, the field today is a collection of intriguing analogies, scattered results, and partial frameworks. We use the term ''theory,''however, in part to signify a provocative goal for this interdisciplinary enterprise, and we hope that the various studies reviewed in this chapter will serve as steps along the path toward an emerging theory of coordination.
We begin with one of the questions that coordination theory may help answer: How will the widespread use of information technology change the ways people work together? This is not the only possible focus of coordination theory, but it is a particularly timely question today for two reasons:
It now appears likely that there will be a number of commercially successful products of this new type (often called 'computer-supported cooperative work'or 'groupware'), and to some observers these applications herald a paradigm shift in computer usage as significant as the earlier shifts to time-sharing and personal computing. It is less clear whether the continuing development of new computer applications in this area will depend solely on trial and error and intuition, or whether it will also be guided by a coherent underlying theory of how people coordinate their activities now and how they might do so differently with computer support.
In the long run the dramatic improvements in the costs and capabilities of information technologies are changing—by orders of magnitude—the constraints on how certain kinds of communication and coordination can occur. At the same time there is a pervasive feeling in businesses today that global interdependencies are becoming more critical, that the pace of change is accelerating, and that we need to create more flexible and adaptive organizations. Together, these changes may soon lead us across a threshold where entirely new ways of organizing human activities become desirable.
For example, new capabilities for communicating information faster, less expensively, and more selectively may help create what some observers (e.g., Toffler 1970) have called ''adhocracies''—rapidly changing organizations with highly decentralized networks of shifting project teams. As another example, lowering the costs of coordination between firms may encourage more market transactions (i.e., more 'buying'rather than 'making') and, at the same time, closer coordination across firm boundaries (e.g., 'just-in-time'inventory management).
If we believe that new forms of organizing are likely to become more common, how can we understand the possibilities better? What other new kinds of coordination structures will emerge in the electronically connected world of the near future? When are these new structures desirable? What is necessary for them to work well?
To some extent, we can answer these questions by observing innovative organizations as they experiment with new technologies. But to understand the experiences of these organizations, we may need to look more deeply into the fundamental constraints on how coordination can occur. And to imagine new kinds of organizational processes that no organizations have tried yet, we may need to look even further afield for ideas.
One way to do both these things—to understand fundamental constraints and to imagine new possibilities—is to look for analogies in how coordination occurs in very different kinds of systems. For example, could we learn something about trade-offs between computing and communicating in distributed computer systems that would illuminate possibilities for coordination in human organizations? Might coordination structures analogous to those used in bee hives or ant colonies be useful for certain aspects of human organizations? And could lessons learned about coordination in human systems help understand computational or biological systems, as well?
For these possibilities to be realized, a great deal of crossdisciplinary interaction is needed. It is not enough just to believe that different systems are similar; we also need an intellectual framework for ''transporting''concepts and results back and forth between the different kinds of systems.
In the remainder of this chapter, we attempt to provide the beginnings of such a framework. We first define coordination in a way that emphasizes its interdisciplinary nature and then suggest an approach for studying it further. Next, we describe examples of how a coordination perspective can be applied in three domains: (1) understanding the effects of information technology on human organizations and markets, (2) designing cooperative work tools, and (3) designing distributed and parallel processing computer systems. Finally, we briefly suggest elements of a research agenda for this new area.