Introduction

The persistence of particular coordination patterns characterises any given form of production organisation (see chapter 6 above). Manufacturing activities provide what is perhaps the most important example of a type of production process in which the structuring of tasks may generally be distinguished from the coordination of fund agents and the integration among flows of work-in-process materials. Following standard practice, we may identify manufacturing activities as those transformation processes associated with ‘[t]he conversion of raw materials into useful products’ (Kazanas, Barker and Gregor, 1981, preface). In this case, it is generally possible to separately identify the raw materials undergoing the various fabrication stages, the productive agents performing an active role at each stage and the particular operations that must be executed in order to obtain a finished product.

Manufacturing processes provide an example of productive transformations in which the three fundamental coordination patterns (that is, task coordination, agents' coordination and materials-in-process coordination) may be separated from each other. Other types of production processes do not lend themselves to the identification of separate components in the same way. For example, agricultural processes (and, more generally, processes associated with the control of biological transformation) are characterised by a close interaction between fund agents and the material in process, particularly if one is considering the operation of natural funds (such as land). Here, the transformation of the material in process often depends in a critical way on the internal transformation of certain funds (such as the soil) according to a pattern that may be changed by technical intervention only up to a certain degree.