Beth A. Bechky

10 Coordination in Organizations: An Integrative Perspective

Abstract Coordination, the process of interaction that integrates a collective set of interdependent tasks, is a central purpose of organizations. In this review we begin by discussing the origins of interest in coordination, tracing some of the classic perspectives. We present a review of recent literature on coordination in organizations arranged according to the mechanisms that help achieve it. We then go beyond this review to provide a framework to understand what different coordination mechanisms and activities accomplish. We propose that coordination mechanisms (such as routines, meetings, plans, and schedules) impact the work of organizations by creating three integrative conditions for coordinated activity: accountability, predictability, and common understanding. We end by examining the implications of such a perspective for future research on coordination in organizations.

Object Lessons: Workplace Artifacts as Representations of Occupational Jurisdiction1

While the development and control of professional jurisdictions has been well studied, less is known about the way in which occupational jurisdictions are enacted within organizations. This article suggests that one can gain insight about such dynamics through analyzing occupational communities’ use of organizational artifacts. This article describes the ways in which two artifacts—engineering drawings and machines—mediate the relations of engineers, technicians, and assemblers in a manufacturing firm. These artifacts are useful in problem solving across boundaries. At the same time, authority over these objects can reinforce or redistribute task area boundaries, and by symbolizing the work of occupational groups, the objects also represent and strengthen beliefs about the legitimacy of a group’s work.

Boundary Organizations: Enabling Collaboration among Unexpected Allies

Our research examines how parties challenging established social systems collaborate with defenders of those systems to achieve mutual goals. With field interviews and observations from four community projects in the open-source movement, we examine how these projects collaborated with firms defending proprietary approaches to software development. Drawing on social movement and organizational theory, we explain how challenging parties not only mobilize to achieve their goals but how they are able to transform contestation into collaboration. Open-source projects and firms held divergent interests but discovered areas of convergent interest and were able to adapt their organizing practices to collaborate through the creation of a boundary organization. By showing how boundary organizations help challengers and defenders manage four critical domains of organizing practices—governance, membership, ownership, and control over production—we provide analytic levers for determining when boundary organizations work. At the same time, we reveal the subsequent triadic role structure that unfolded among communities, the boundary organizations they designed, and firms.

In the Backrooms of Science The Work of Technicians in Science Labs

This article presents data from an ethnographic study of science technicians. The article proposes a model of the science technicians role as broker in a serially interdependent occupational division of labor and then contextualizes the model by examining how technicians conceptualize and manage troubles that arise in the course of scientific procedures. The data suggest that technicians possess most of a labs contextual knowledge and skill and that technicians, therefore, play a critical role in the production of scientific knowledge. Because contextual knowledge carries less status than formal knowledge, however, technicians experience status inconsistencies. The implications of such status inconsistencies for the transition to an increasingly technical workforce are discussed.

Making Organizational Theory Work: Institutions, Occupations, and Negotiated Orders

In this essay I argue that organizational theorizing would benefit from incorporating a richer understanding of work and occupations. To demonstrate how, I turn to recent literature analyzing inhabited institutions, occupations as institutions, and occupations as negotiated orders. I explore the theoretical and methodological implications of these approaches to show how they challenge some of our more abstract images of organizations. They do so by grounding their theoretical frameworks in work practices and interaction, interpretation and meaning, and understandings of occupational membership.

What Do Technicians Mean When They Talk about Professionalism? An Ethnography of Speaking

Abstract Sociologists have paid little attention to what people mean when they call themselves “professionals” in their everyday talk. Typically, when occupations lack the characteristics of self-control associated with the established professions, such talk is dismissed as desire for greater status. An ethnography of speaking conducted among several technicians’ occupations suggests that dismissing talk of professionalism may have been premature. The results of this study indicate that among technicians, professional talk highlights dynamics of respect, collaboration, and expertise crucial to the horizontal divisions of labor that are common in postindustrial workplaces, but have very little to do with the desire for occupational power.