COORDINATION THEORY - Human-Computer Interaction and Management Information Systems: Foundations - page 103

by Malone and Crowston are producer/consumer dependencies, simultaneity constraints and
task/subtask relations. Since its 1994 publication, nearly three hundred papers and dissertations
have referred to or made use of the CT approach. The purpose of this chapter is to introduce CT,
review the impact it has had for MIS HCI and its limitations, to discuss factors contributing to its
level of impact and to identify areas needing further research.
Before introducing coordination theory in detail, we wish to respond to commentators who
have objected to the name “coordination theory,” arguing that it is not in fact a theory. This cri-
tique presumes a definition of theory such as:
“A set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, espe-
cially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make pre-
dictions about natural phenomena”
( American Heritage Dictionary , 2000).
Such statements are also known as scientific laws. Malone and Crowston chose the name
“coordination theory” in part because many of the fields synthesized do have such laws and the
hope was that coordination theory would develop to include them, even if it did not in its initial
statement. However, the critique overlooks the fact that theories include scientific concepts as
well as laws (Kaplan, 1998, p. 297). Theory in this sense helps make sense of data and makes
observed events meaningful. Concept and theory generation go hand in hand, and an initial set of
concepts guides the search for data and for laws. As we will see, coordination theory definitely
includes a set of concepts that can be used to label phenomena and link them to others, and thus
fulfills this important function of theory. In its current state though, we would describe coordina-
tion theory as a pattern model (Kaplan, 1998, p. 327), meaning that it seeks to explain phenom-
ena by showing how they fit a known pattern.
CONTRIBUTIONS OF COORDINATION THEORY
The primary purpose of Malone and Crowston (1994) was to synthesize work done on coordina-
tion from a variety of fields. The work started with an interest in how groupware (i.e., software
designed to support groups of people working together) might help people to coordinate their
activities better. The paper made three key contributions.
First Contribution: Definition of Coordination
The first contribution of the paper was a concise definition of coordination as “managing depen-
dencies between activities.” Coordination has been a long-standing interest of organizational
scholars, and, more recently, of computer scientists, so many definitions for this term had been
proposed. Malone and Crowston (1994) and Weigand et al. (2003) list several, including:
• Structuring and facilitating transactions between interdependent components (Chandler,
1962)
• The protocols, tasks, and decision-making mechanisms designed to achieve concerted
actions between interdependent units (Thompson, 1967)
• The integrative devices for interconnecting differentiated sub-units (Lawrence and Lorsch,
1967)