ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the reconceptualization of the theoretical understanding of coordination that has taken place and shows how shared narratives of politicians and administrators become a sensemaking condition for coordination between health care providers. It sets out to illustrate how new demands for coordination as a managerial example of organizational change are conditioned on sensemaking and narratives. The chapter also presents different organizational theories of coordination, from a classical design model toward an understanding of contemporary coordination by presenting the concept of pluricentric coordination, wherein many health care providers see themselves as the center of coordination. Traditional organizational studies of coordination were based on the presumption that coordination is the outcome of processes within coherent institutionally or functionally demarcated units that follow a specific, predetermined, and rational logic of consequentiality. When depicting a hospital as a pyramid diagram, with vertical and horizontal connections to units, we are using a functional description.
