This chapter introduces the emerging research area of coordination theory, which focuses on the interdisciplinary study of coordination. The authors define coordination as managing dependencies among activities and suggest that further progress can be made by characterizing different types of dependencies and identifying coordination processes to manage them. The chapter outlines various coordination processes, including resource allocation, producer/consumer relationships, simultaneity constraints, and task/subtask dependencies. It also discusses the application of a coordination perspective in three domains: understanding the effects of information technology on human organizations and markets, designing cooperative work tools, and designing distributed and parallel computer systems. The final section briefly outlines a research agenda for this new area, emphasizing the need for interdisciplinary interaction and the development of a comprehensive framework for studying coordination.This chapter introduces the emerging research area of coordination theory, which focuses on the interdisciplinary study of coordination. The authors define coordination as managing dependencies among activities and suggest that further progress can be made by characterizing different types of dependencies and identifying coordination processes to manage them. The chapter outlines various coordination processes, including resource allocation, producer/consumer relationships, simultaneity constraints, and task/subtask dependencies. It also discusses the application of a coordination perspective in three domains: understanding the effects of information technology on human organizations and markets, designing cooperative work tools, and designing distributed and parallel computer systems. The final section briefly outlines a research agenda for this new area, emphasizing the need for interdisciplinary interaction and the development of a comprehensive framework for studying coordination.