ABSTRACT

In one of his classical works, the organizational sociologist Henry Mintzberg has argued that the coordination of worktasks is a fundamental necessity for an organization (1979). The activities of the individual(s) managing the organization’s resources, to mention a simple example, have to be coordinated with the activities of the individual(s) using those resources. A very small organization can survive on mere ‘coordination by feedback’: the direct coordination of work through direct supervision or informal communication between the (few) employees. Larger organizations draw upon standardization and technologies to tackle their increased coordination needs. When worktasks are explicated and standardized, for example, the necessary coordination is ‘programmed’ into these specifications, and is then subsequently automatically ensured. Likewise, the invention of the ‘record’, the filing cabinet and crossreferencing and indexing systems made it possible for an increasingly complex organization to handle an increasing number of clients. Such records are highly efficient ‘externalized’ memories-making the continuous handling of one individual by many different organizational members possible without the need for constant face-to-face contact between those members.