Person

Paul S. Adler

Organization scholar of NUMMI and the learning bureaucracy as joint-venture practice.

Why this matters

Adler shows how shared production systems can redistribute who learns—and who counts as a maker of industrial history.

Works

article

The 'Learning Bureaucracy': New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc

Adler, Paul S. "The 'Learning Bureaucracy': New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc." In *Research in Organizational Behavior*, vol. 15, edited by Barry M. Staw and L. L. Cummings, 111-94. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1993.

Related concepts

Concept

Coordination

Coordination names the problem of acting together when lives are fragmented—when people must move collectively across distance, time, strangers, and difference without complete information or full agreement. It becomes important when individual judgment alone cannot sustain the group, when behavior must hold across contexts that no one person can see completely. Coordination helps preserve collective capacity by making expectations predictable, by enabling strangers to act together under shared rules, by allowing large-scale projects that no single person could accomplish. Roles, rituals, law, canon, procedure, and bureaucracy are all coordination technologies—tools for making tomorrow recognizable from yesterday so action can continue. But coordination can become brittle when it suppresses the feedback and variation it needs to stay responsive, when inherited patterns keep moving after fit has thinned, when dissent is treated as disruption rather than signal. Coordination purchased at the cost of revision can continue functioning long after it has stopped serving the purposes that gave it authority. The question coordination raises is: what coordination problem is this tool solving? What breaks if behavior stops being predictable? Coordination differs from alignment in that coordination is about collective movement, while alignment is about shared direction or values.

Concept

Agency

Agency names whether a person or institution can actually move the scene, not only be named on the org chart. It becomes important when speech, responsibility, or moral weight outrun real leverage. It helps preserve honest coordination by distinguishing who can act from who must only absorb consequence, but can fail when low agency is mistaken for bad faith or when structural limits are narrated as personal failure. It differs from responsibility because responsibility can remain assigned when agency has thinned; it differs from judgment because agency is capacity to act, not the evaluative practice of deciding well.

Related books

Book

The World We Make Together

How Ordinary People, Unequal Power, and Shared Action Shape History

History is collective, but responsibility remains uneven. The World We Make Together follows ordinary objects—a switch, a ballot, a fence, a bowl, a scale—into the institutions and relationships through which people shape public life without becoming either solitary heroes or passive products of structure.