The business environment is becoming increasingly global and competitive which in turn makes the role of a business manager more challenging and diverse. For this reason and others companies are growing through cross border mergers, joint ventures, direct investments and others strategic alliances. Similarly markets are getting closer to each other by virtue of a variety of integration from a simple trade level integration to political unification. Because of these changes, markets followed by product and customer integration, both product and customers are becoming increasingly global. In return, all these changes have posed challenges for companies and managers involved in international business. These changes and challenges are not merely technical ones but more importantly they are socio-cultural. Today's business leaders, therefore, should possess not only technical competencies but also and most importantly have an in-depth understanding of different socio-political systems existing in the world. Considering the fact that this globalization process is taking place everywhere in the world.

The organizational history of American government during the past 100 years has been written principally in terms of the creation of larger and larger public organizations. Beginning with the Progressive movement, no matter the goal, the reflexive response has been to consolidate and centralize into formal hierarchies. That efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability, and the coordination necessary to achieve them, are promoted by such reorganizations has become widely accepted.
Borrowing from social psychology, sociology, political science, and public administration, and using the public transit system of the San Francisco Bay area for illustrative purposes, Donald Chisholm directly challenges this received wisdom. He argues that, contrary to contemporary canons of public administration, we should actively resist the temptation to consolidate and centralize our public organizations. Rather, we should carefully match organizational design with observed types and levels of interdependence, since organizational systems that on the surface appear to be tightly linked webs of interdependence on closer examination often prove decomposable into relatively simpler subsystems that may be coordinated through decentralized, informal organizational arrangements.
Chisholm finds that informal channels between actors at different organizations prove remarkably effective and durable as instruments of coordination. Developed and maintained as needed rather than according to a single preconceived design, informal channels, along with informal conventions and contracts, tend to match interorganization interdependence closely and to facilitate coordination. Relying on such measures reduces thecognitive demands and obviates the necessity for broadscale political agreement typical of coordination by centralized, formal organizations. They also advance other important values that are frequently absent in formally consolidated organizations, such as reliability, flexibility, and the representation of varied interests.
"Coordination Without Hierarchy" is an incisive, penetrating work whose conclusions apply to a wide range of public organizations at all levels of government. It will be of interest to a broad array of social scientists and policymakers.
In an earlier version, "Coordination Without Hierarchy" received the American Political Science Association 1985 Leonard D. White Award for the best doctoral dissertation in the field of public administration, including broadly related problems of policy formation and administrative theory.