Toward a Theory of Coordinating: Creating Coordinating Mechanisms in Practice

Abstract

T his paper uses a practice perspective to study coordinating as dynamic activities that are continuously created and modified in order to enact organizational relationships and activities. It is based on the case of Servico, an organization undergoing a major restructuring of its value chain in response to a change in government regulation. In our case, the actors iterate between the abstract concept of a coordinating mechanism referred to as end-to-end management and its performance in practice. They do this via five performative-ostensive cycles: (1) enacting disruption, (2) orienting to absence, (3) creating elements, (4) forming new patterns, and (5) stabilizing new patterns. These cycles and the relationships between them constitute a process model of coordinating. This model highlights the importance of absence in the coordinating process and demonstrates how experiencing absence shapes subsequent coordinating activity. IntroductionThis paper is about the process of coordinating. We show that coordinating mechanisms are dynamic social practices that are under continuous construction. Despite some preoccupation in the literature with specifying the standards, rules, and schedules that comprise coordinating mechanisms, organization theorists have long noted that these mechanisms are not stable entities (e.g., Galbraith 1977, Lawrence and Lorsch 1967, March and Simon 1958, Thompson 1967. Indeed, scholars have shown that mechanisms fluctuate to adapt to conditions of uncertainty, novelty, and change when existing ways of organizing activities are disrupted and must be accomplished in new ways (Adler 1995;Argote 1982;Crowston 1997;Feldman 2000Feldman , 2003Pentland 1992). There are thus increasing calls for research to examine the dynamic nature of coordinating mechanisms as they are constructed within the activities of interdependent actors as they perform organizational tasks over time (Adler 1995, Ching et al. 1992, Jarzabkowski 2004, Malone and Crowston 1994, Okhuysen and Bechky 2009. By shifting the analytic focus from coordinating mechanisms as reified standards, rules, and procedures to coordinating as a dynamic social practice, our research provides insight into the microprocesses involved in coordinating.We study the coordinating of a major structural change at Servico, a Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) 100 company, through the performance of a specific coordinating mechanism, end-to-end management (E2E). Drawing on performative and ostensive concepts as developed in the literature on organizational routines (e.g., Feldman 2000, Feldman and Pentland 2003, Pentland and Feldman 2005, Howard-Grenville 2005, Levinthal and Rerup 2006, Rerup and Feldman 2011, Zbaracki and Bergen 2010, we examine how actors iterate between the abstract concept of end-to-end management and their performance of it in practice. We explain how these performances enact what the actors come to identify as end-to-end management and how they use it as part of accomplishing a major coordinating task: restructuring the core who...

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