Toward the microfoundations of interorganizational coordination: The experience of artifacts as a coordination mechanism amid pervasive conflict

Interorganizational project structures, typified in the construction industry, are highly equivocal and interdependent contexts that require coordination amid pervasive conflict. Although organizations are typically considered the unit of analysis in interorganizational coordination, it is the individual organizational representatives who are responsible for the `on the ground? coordinative efforts. In a two-year-long ethnography of an interorganizational construction project, I explored how individual organizational representatives used artifacts and their associated sensate experience to manage conflict and resolve felt tension in order to coordinate. The theorized process model I developed shows how the most productive interactions among organizational representatives involved creating an artifactual experience, comprising interaction with an artifact that evoked a meaningful aesthetic experience. In project team meetings, organizational representatives would use artifacts such as building plans, models, and prototypes to create an artifactual interaction comprising four interactive dimensions of revealing, engaging with, commentating on, and proximally positioning to the artifact. In so doing, the bodily senses of the organizational representatives were engaged in an aesthetic experience. Through the synchrony in attention and shared aesthetic experience, project team members experienced increases in collective energy that cut through the felt tension that would emerge in team meetings. Rather than resolving interorganizational conflicts, the collective energy helped project team members to co-construct a salient line of discourse for the team, which took the form of a decision or provisional agreement that became the next concrete step in a path forward. My findings on experience-as-coordination-mechanism suggest that embodied forms of knowledge such as felt tension, aesthetic experience, and collective energy are important for understanding interorganizational?and not just interpersonal or intrateam?coordination. The elements of the artifactual experience highlight how participants enact objects and materials as coordination mechanisms in interorganizational contexts, complementing accounts of boundary objects in interprofessional environments. These insights bear implications for coordinating teamwork in a range of boundary-spanning environments.