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In today’s rapidly changing global work environment, all workers directly experience increased organizational complexity. Companies are functionally distributed, many across the globe. Intense competition for markets and margins makes adaptiveness and innovation imperative. Information and communication technologies (ICT) are pervasive and fundamental infrastructures, their use deeply integrated into work processes. Workers collaborate electronically with co-workers they may never meet face-to-face or with employees of other companies. New boundaries of time, space, business unit, culture, company partnerships, and software tools are driving the adoption of a variety of novel organizational forms. On a macro-level, these changes have started to reshape society, leading some to speak of the “Network Society” and the “Information Age.”

American social science since World War II has been centrally shaped by the “cognitive revolution.” Fields as disparate as behavioral economics and cognitive anthropology have exploited a shared core of ideas about the workings and limitations of human cognition, such short-term memory and judgment heuristics. This cognitive toolkit has been a principal asset in the efforts to understand and better support the requirements of newly emerging forms of virtual organization. This keynote address examines two other human faculties, habit and emotion. Across western intellectual history these have often been understood as equally important determinants of organized action, and this was the case in the period before World War II. However, since then habit and emotion have not been tightly integrated dimensions of our analyses of social life, including virtual organizing. Rather they have served, if present at all, as labels for clusters of exceptions, cases that involved issues not well handled by the default cognitive approach. Both habit and emotion are rising in psychology as topics of inquiry. These two additional human faculties are notable for being significantly less available to direct introspection, but powerful new measurement techniques—most notably various forms of scanning—are bringing into focus their large role in determining our actions. The keynote provides an overview of these developments and some suggestions some of their implications for the understanding and supporting virtual organizing with concepts that make habit and emotion more central to the primary analysis.

It seems kind of strange that eating parasitic worms causes a cure rather than a disease. Yet, this fact is no stranger than many other man-bites-dog stories about “real life” in contemporary times. Such stories arise at moments of changing equilibria in the processes of the social construction of reality. They are especially evident during periods of intense dialectic in which long held theses are being upended by powerful antitheses, and the glimmer of an eventual synthesis is still occluded by ignorance and confusion about what is at stake. The emergent dialectic among the “real” and the “virtual” provides a particularly interesting opportunity to explore the mechanisms of such dialectics. The opening quote from Laurie Anderson is a device to explicate the tension between the real and the virtual, and the mechanics of reconciliation by which a new equilibrium might be forged.

The purpose of this paper is to define the phenomena associated with virtual collaborative work from both a cognitive and social cognitive perspective. The authors put forth an approach that assumes all people are natural sense-makers, sense-givers and organizers. The authors posit that the collaborative work we observe within both informal (ad hoc teams or communities) and formal (organizational) environments derives from fundamental, ubiquitous cognitive and social behavior intimately tied to context-specific problems or situations. The paper begins by challenging the need to re-define terms like “virtual” and “team” in a manner which works to subtly shift the focus of study from “proximal vs. distributed” to the more fruitful “fundamental behavior vs. technological constraints.” The paper then presents a framework for virtual collaborative work and discusses its implications on issues related to teams, leadership, creativity, and the design and use of information technology.

Firms are increasingly embedded in networks of relationships with other organizations that are of strategic importance. An organization’s participation in a network may provide access to information, resources, markets, and technologies, or it may lock it in unproductive relationships from which it may be difficult to extricate. Therefore, it is no longer adequate to analyze firms’ conduct and performance by examining firms in isolation from their network partners. Strategy research has investigated inter-organizational alliances for some time. However, the primary focus of this research has been to examine the antecedents of network formation and relatively lesser attention has been paid to the implications of alliances and networks on a firm’s performance. Since virtual organizations are conceptualized as strategic networks and alliances among organizations, we examined literature on virtual organizations to understand what has been done in inter-organizational context. We found 34 papers out of a total of 117 papers on virtual organization that examined virtual organizing at inter-organizational level. We classified each of the short-listed papers by virtual organizing type (network membership, network structure, tie modality, and time-frame), performance, and dilemmas of virtual organizing. Our analyses showed that inter-organization virtual organizing strategy varied with the goals of virtual organizing. Across the short-listed papers we found a pattern of organizing that depended on whether organizing was for abstract resources (knowledge, skills, competencies, etc.) or for specific goals (outsourcing key components). Virtual organizing for abstract resources tended to exhibit decentralized network structure and collaborative ties with partners, while virtual organizing for specific goals tended to exhibit centralized network structure and opportunistic ties. We found a lack of empirical literature examining the process of inter-organization virtual organizing strategy and its consequences.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an example of an empirical procedure for generating user-based cognitive and social cognitive models of tasks/problems/contexts that can be employed to create readily navigable link structures for virtuality-mediated communication and collaboration purposes. Employing a natural language, user-based method, this study describes patterns found across 128 interviews where respondents were describing their cognitive movement in the form of steps taken during an interactive E-Commerce situation. Employing these patterns, we analytically develop a model of E-Commerce as a series of logically necessary steps over time. The resulting model illustrates the utility of individual cognitive and social cognitive patterns to structure virtuality as a series of interactive links associated with particular tasks/problems/contexts. Logical structures derived in this manner have the additional strength of requiring no “training” of users because they already recognize the inherent linguistic, temporal and functional relationships. As an added benefit, the model of E-Commerce generated in this study has concrete practical implications for web site design and evaluation.

Firms face an environment changing at an increasingly rapid pace. Unfortunately, the speed at which organizations can adapt their strategies and competencies to exploit such opportunities remains limited. In this paper we weave together an external perspective on market-facing with an internal perspective on competency development and marshalling to describe the organizational activities necessary for firms to cooperate within a virtual organization. We argue that firms can address their individual limitations through a systematic process that we call “competence rallying,” with which they can access market opportunities and additional needed competencies. Specifically, we present a local process theory of how one network of firms reliably engineers and delivers manufacturing projects using an inter-organizational process that works to meet short-term market opportunities. Our theory is grounded in the experiences of the project, an organized network for regional cooperation in the manufacturing industry around the Bodensee in Europe. The success of manufacturing projects in a virtual organization is predicated on specific organizational activities in four phases of the competence rallying process: 1) identification and development of competencies, 2) identification and facing of market opportunities, 3) marshalling of competencies, and 4) a short-term cooperative effort.

While spatial boundaries include the geographic differences among team members (different cities), temporal boundaries include the workday differences among team members (different time zones). In global teams members have to deal with both spatial and temporal boundaries since their co-workers are often located in cities within and across time zones. For global team members with high spatial boundaries and low temporal boundaries (those in different cities in the same time zone), synchronous communication technologies such as the telephone and instant messenger provide a means for real-time interaction. However, for global team members with high spatial boundaries and high temporal boundaries (those in different cities in different time zones), asynchronous communication technologies, such as e-mail and web software, provide a way to interact intermittently. Using social network data from 625 team members (representing 5986 pairs) across 137 global teams in a multi-national semiconductor firm, we explore the impact of spatial and temporal boundaries on coordination delay. We also illustrate how member awareness can reduce coordination delay, thus increasing the likelihood of better global team performance.

In this paper, I explain how globally distributed software development subunits can coordinate their activities with information systems (IS). The basis of this explanation lies in the contemporary proliferation of global software development (GSD) activities that suggests an unexplained reality: organizations practicing GSD are somehow regulating their IS to cope with increasing and varied uncertainties. Through an empirical example of an organization’s subunit’s regulating and coping, I make the case that requisite variety in a subunit’s information systems is a dependent variable for managing uncertainties leading to optimal coordination. In this example, I show varied uncertainties that faced the subunit, and I explain how variety in its information system was requisite for managing the uncertainties satisfactorily. Based on these explanations, I suggest four characteristics of variety in IS that will be requisite for managing uncertainties in GSD: developers’ agility; developers’ continuity and traveling; high frequency of communications; and varied communication modes and technologies.

The demands of the global world increasingly dictate that people travel in order to conduct work. Oftentimes, this means that team members are neither strictly here nor there. Teams such as these are hybrids, where members alternate between co-located and distributed contexts. The pervasive nature of information and communication technologies, however, continues to impose an expectation of availability on the team members even as they travel. In this paper, we take a reflexive research stance to inform our understanding of the complexities of accomplishing knowledge work within a hybrid team configuration. An illustrative case highlights issues and outcomes associated with member availability that arose during the writing of a research paper. Categorical reasons for member unavailability are identified and contrasted with the expectation of availability. We suggest that the issues and conflict we experienced may be traced to the ambiguous nature of the task and the early project phase requiring problem for mulation.