The work coordinators do. An organisational reflection on the coordination function as enactive of change in complex policy fields.

In this paper, we reflect on the work of coordinators in the fields of mental healthcare and internment. We examine the contribution of this new type of workers to the implementing of policy plans targeting complex social problems, such as the issue of mental health care fragmentation.
We outline a theoretical and methodological framework appropriate to the study of coordination in
action, before describing the coordinators’ working environment, concrete coordination practices and
the occasions in which they are visible.
Based on this empirical description, we argue that the coordinator work begin more with ignorance than with knowledge and that coordinators do not know precisely who they are, as coordinators, both individually and collectively. Neither do they know exactly what to do. The coordinators’ world is nevertheless full of knowledge: there are plenty of experts claiming diverging interpretations of the complex problems addressed by the coordinators. Therefore, we ask how the coordinators deal with their ignorance in such an ambiguous world, that is, a world characterised by both an abundance of knowledge and a scarcity of resources.
We show that postulating the coordinators ignorance helps to see what is the core of their function and how they perform their work, that is, by attending and scheduling meetings where previously separated and incommensurable events are linked together.