Interorganizational Coordination

Until the middle of the twentieth century, it would have been relatively rare for an encyclopedia concerned about governance to highlight interorganizational coordination. Attention to any aspect of interorganizational issues would have emerged from the work of organizational sociologists who noted that there were times when it was relevant to look beyond the borders of a specific organization. A range of organizational theories was related to the work of these sociologists, including issues dealing with organizational design and structure, questions of strategies, and institutional theories. Most of the research focused on these issues either emphasized generic organizations or was limited to private-sector organizations.

One such theory, resource dependency theory, was most directly related to the interorganizational coordination topic. This theory argued that organizations depend on the environment for their survival and that other organizations within the environment create interdependencies that allow an organization to reduce uncertainty. Scholars dealing with the dimensions of these relationships tended to focus on private-sector behavior, particularly the ways that firms found ways to maximize their power and control of resources at the [Page 486]same time as they acknowledged the existence of other organizations within the environment.

The behavior that emerged from this set of relationships was often characterized as network behavior. Network theory highlighted the patterns of recurring linkages either inside or outside of organizations, especially how individuals manage what were called boundary-spanning activities. It included a wide range of behaviors from individual social relationships to more structured relationships between organizations. Networks could be temporary or permanent but they all acknowledged that an individual organization was unable to achieve its goals by acting alone.

During the post–World War II era, it became increasingly obvious that many of the issues that had emerged from the organizational theory perspective had relevance to the behaviors of the public sector. Few individual public organizations could achieve their goals without looking to others who were also involved in the work of the organization. This occurred as a result of the growth of government activity, the expansion of political agendas, and the complexity that followed this growth.

But despite the intellectual power of the ideas that were found in organizational theory, it was difficult to put them into practice in the public sector. Many of the problems or perceptions of governance failure were related to difficulties involving interorganizational coordination. Perhaps nothing illustrated these problems as well as the 2005 Hurricane Katrina disaster. Coordination did not occur between specialized federal government agencies, between the public and private sectors, between levels of government (federal, state, and local jurisdictions), and between political officials and professional experts. Although the problems related to Katrina were relatively obvious, it was not clear how they could be addressed.

At least three different approaches are relevant to understanding how the public sector can deal with the challenges of interorganizational coordination: the policy approach, the federalism approach, and the management approach. The policy approach highlights the interplay between the fragmented structure of policies and decision-making venues and attempts to respond to social and economic problems that reached beyond the traditional fragmented structure. Although the problems reach beyond separate and discrete categories, the actors within the political system were defined by specialized relationships between existing interest groups, legislative actors, and bureaucratic offices. This shift was illustrated by the shift from what were called iron triangle relationships (between the three actors) to what Hugh Heclo termed issue networks that cut across otherwise separate relationships. In addition, the complexity of the system pushed a variety of policy advocates to call for analyses that highlighted relationships from the bottom up instead of looking at the system from the top down. During the 1960s, there were attempts to devise coordination strategies from the bottom up, such as the Community Action Programs and the Model Cities program.

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