THE INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDY OF COORDINATION

This survey characterizes an emerging research area, sometimes called coordination theory, that focuses on the interdisciplinary study of co ordination. Research in this area uses and extends ideas about coordin ation from disciplines such as computer science, organization theory, operations research, economics, linguistics, and psychology. A key ins ight of the framework presented here is that coordination can be seen as the process of managing dependencies among activities. Further prog ress, therefore, should be possible by characterizing different kinds of dependencies and identifying the coordination processes that can be used to manage them. A variety of processes are analyzed from this pe rspective, and commonalities across disciplines are identified. Proces ses analyzed include those for managing shared resources, producer/con sumer relationships, simultaneity constraints, and task/subtask depend encies. Section 3 summarizes ways of applying a coordination perspecti ve in three different domains: (1) understanding the effects of inform ation technology on human organizations and markets, (2) designing coo perative work tools, and (3) designing distributed and parallel comput er systems. In the final section, elements of a research agenda in thi s new area are briefly outlined.