coordination

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coordination

the process of combining together the work of ORGANIZATION members and departments to achieve the desired end-product or goals of the organization. Coordination is necessary at two levels:

the bringing together of production tasks to achieve production goals with the minimum of waste, buffer stocks, etc.;
the coordination of all organizational functions to achieve effective and efficient operations and the maintenance of the organization as a viable entity.

Coordination of a complex range of activities is fraught with problems, and it is a central issue in the design and running of organizations. Some organizations seek to achieve coordination by formulating a range of rules and procedures to guide and govern the work of employees and departments. Others prefer to rely on the skills, knowledge and commitment of their employees to interpret what forms of coordination are necessary (see MECHANISTIC AND ORGANISMIC, CULTURE). Most organizations adopt a combination of the two. In all organizations, however, the need for coordination is embodied in the formal structure. Some adopt a FUNCTIONAL STRUCTURE, some a PRODUCT-BASED STRUCTURE, whilst others adopt a MATRIX STRUCTURE explicitly to tackle problems of coordination.

coordination

the process whereby the specialized (see SPECIALIZATION) activities of different participants in an economy are synchronized. Coordination of TRANSACTIONS may take place through MARKETS or within ORGANIZATIONS. Within organizations, coordination is necessary to try to ensure that decisions within subunits of the organization are consistent with each other and with the objectives of the organization as a whole. See INTERNAL MARKETS.

References in periodicals archive ?

Besides the road game, a typical example of a modern neoclassical coordination game is the choice between Beta and VHS standards for videocassettes.

Let us be clear: Hayek certainly does have in mind the notion of an interlocking arrangement of individual plans such that a social optimum is achieved, however vague that sense of optimality may be defined, and regardless of whether Hayek would feel comfortable with Klein's notion of a "superior being named Joy who is invisible and who beholds the vast economic order." Armed with Klein's definition of concatenate coordination, one will certainly see the concept spilling out of Hayek's work.

However, our main point is that surely Klein's definition of mutual coordination is also embedded in Hayek's work.

Note the similarity between Hayek's passage above and the quotation below that Klein (and co-author) selects from Schelling to motivate the discussion of mutual coordination. Schelling gives the example of a man and wife separated in a department store and comments:

Schelling's discussion seems quite complementary to Hayek's work on intertemporal equilibrium, especially if changing market prices are the "signal that coordinates their expectations of each other." Yet in their 2009 paper, Klein and Orsborn introduce the above Schelling quote to distinguish the new usage of the term coordination from the older meaning that economists such as Hayek (and others at the London School of Economics) had had in mind.

To repeat my earlier claim, I suggest that if a randomly selected Austrian (who was unfamiliar with Klein's treatment) were asked whether Hayek's knowledge papers had to do with coordination in the sense of an interior designer planning the color scheme of a living room versus the sense of friends synchronizing their plans to meet up for a movie, then it is very likely that the Austrian would say Hayek's usage lined up with the second sense (i.e., Klein's "mutual coordination").

Coordination: a critique of Daniel Klein

The actor layer does not depend on the coordination layer.

The coordination layer intercepts messages among actors and applies coordination constraints on the messages.

From the perspective of a coordinator, a role enables the coordination of a set of actors that share the same static description of behaviors without requiring the coordinator to be aware of the individual actors in the set.

To comply with the separation of concern principle, we categorize these actors into two types: computation actors that capture system computation concerns, and coordination actors that abstract system coordination concerns.

Events are special messages that are atomically dispatched on coordination actors.

This requirement guarantees that coordination constraints are applied on related messages before these messages are dispatched on computation actors.