Governance Logistics: Definition and Scope of a Practice Discipline

Human systems coordinate through three logics: hierarchy (coordination by authority), market (coordination by exchange), and network (coordination by trust and reciprocity). The trichotomy is settled scholarship, with a lineage running from Polanyi (1944) through Williamson (1975), Ouchi (1980), Powell (1990), and Ostrom (1990). Only one of the three logics, however, ever acquired instrumentation — legible signals, countable feedback, a mathematics, a profession. This paper defines Governance Logistics as the practice discipline that closes that gap: reading which logics a system is running, locating where they collide, and delivering governance arrangements fitted to the case. The paper states the definition, situates the discipline in the coordination-logics literature, specifies its scope across the diagnose–deliverdecide arc, fixes the surrounding term architecture, and bounds the category against neighboring fields — metagovernance theory, governance–risk–compliance practice, and the governance of logistics operations. The paper claims a category of practice, not a theoretical discovery.