Virtual Organizations:
A new organizational form or just 'business as usual'?

This section of the module will examine the concept of the Virtual Organization as a Strategic Vision. It will examine some of the contrasting views concerning what Virtual Organizations are, what their supposed benefits might be and how they might be classified and differentiated.

The conditions in which Virtual Organizations operate, were discussed earlier in this module and are discussed in greater detail in The Environment: Working in Virtual Organizations from the MSc IP HI2 module.

The distinction between the Virtual Organization and other forms of virtual group such as distributed teams, home based work and telework and communities of practice will be examined in greater detail later in the module.

The broad issues behind Distributed Collaborative Working are discussed in greater detail in an overview of Distributed Collaborative Work, which is also from the MSc IP HI2 module. Finally, the Encyclopedia from CALT at Insead offers a large selection of material that may be of general interest for this section on and the Virtual Organization, as well as for the later sections on other types of virtual group.

Reading

Books

• See any of the books from the MIS books section

or

• Barnatt C, Cyber Business - Mindsets for a Wired Age, John Wiley and Sons, 1995
• Becker, F. and Steele, F. Workplace by Design: Mapping the High-performance Workscape. San Francisco: Jossey Bass 1995
• Rheingold H, The Virtual Community, Minerva, 1995
• Davidow, W.H. and Malone. M.S. The Virtual Corporation: Structuring and Revitalizing the Corporation for the 21st Century. New York: Harper Business, 1992

Articles

• Hinds, P. and Kiesler, S. (1995). "Communication Across Boundaries: Work, Structure, and Use of Communication Technologies in a Large Organization." Organizational Science, 6(4), pp 373-93
• Malone, T.W. and Rockart, J.F. (1991) Computers, networks and the corporation. Scientific American, 265(3), 92-99.
• Li. F and Gillespie. A, (1994) Team telework: An emergent form of work organization in Baskerville R et al (eds) Transforming Organizations with Information Technology, North Holland/IFIP WG8 2, Amsterdam, pp 397-418
• Barnatt. C. (1995) Office space cyberspace and virtual organization, Journal of General Management, 20(4), pp 78-92
• Benson-Armer. R and Hsieh. T (1997) Teamwork across time and space, McKinsey Quarterly, vol 4, pp 19-27
• Handy, C. (1995) Trust and the Virtual Organization. Harvard Business Review. 73 (3). pp. 40-50
• Norfolk D (1995), The Virtual Enterprise, Information Age, November, pp 32-39
• Sheehy N and Gallaher T (1996), Can Virtual Organizations be made real?, The Psychologist, April, pp 159-162

Links

• If you wish to search for additional sources of information, use the MIS links page

These case studies present two contrasting views of virtual organizations. The first sees them as 'members bound by a long term common interest or goal' and the second as 'a transitory network of individuals'.

• Network Structure in Virtual Organizations
  Virtual organizations that use e-mail to communicate and coordinate are becoming ubiquitous. Research suggests that virtual organizations will be decentralized and non-hierarchical. This paper examines the behavior of the Soar Group, a group concerned with the development of a general purpose AI architecture.
• In Search of a Virtual Organization
  The concept of a virtual organization - a network of individuals coupled together by advanced communications technologies - continues to grow. However, a lack of real-world cases poses a significant problem, particularly within the small business sector. This paper presents a case study of a UK-based SME - Cavendish Management Resources

• The Virtual Corporation
  As information and communications technologies overcome the constraints of time and distance, it becomes possible to create virtual organizations. Short overview of The Virtual Corporation from David Skyrme Associates.
• Taxonomy of Virtual Organizations and the Implications for Effective Management
  It is too simplistic to give a single definition of the term virtual organization, because various authors differ in their assigned meanings. I will argue that there are in fact at least 4 types of virtual organization. This paper will outline a simple taxonomy for discussing virtual organizations, and will illustrate that taxonomy with several examples.
• A Typology of Virtual Communities: A Multi-Disciplinary Foundation for Future Research
  n this paper, a virtual community is defined as an aggregation of individuals or business partners who interact around a shared interest, where the interaction is at least partially supported and/or mediated by technology and guided by some protocols or norms. It develops a classification system that could be useful to researchers from various disciplinary perspectives.
• Virtual Organizations
  Links to several articles on Virtual Organizations from the Sociology of Organization page at SocioSite
• Virtual Organizations, Organizational Knowledge and The Customer: How 'Virtual Organizations' deal with 'Real' Customers.
  This paper reflects on the results of a long-standing ethnography of customer-facing work within a large retail Bank. Features of the contingent and skilful nature of that work, in an institution undergoing large scale organizational change, are documented and used to comment on aspects of working with 'virtual customers' within an organization that might be seen as moving towards the model of the 'virtual organization'.
• Everything's Coming Up Virtual
  Companies are rapidly moving toward a distributed work force that uses technology to link workers and functions at scattered sites. This change is rapidly altering the nature of work. This paper examines the factors behind the growth of the virtual organization.
• Communication Patterns as Determinants of Organizational Identification in a Virtual Organization
  Recent advances in information technologies provide employees the freedom to work from any place and at any time. Such temporal and spatial dispersion, however, threatens the very meaning of firms. We suggest that organizational identification may be the critical glue linking virtual workers and their organizations. We explore the role that information technologies play in the creation and maintenance of a common identity among decoupled organization members.
• Towards Web Support For Tacit Knowledge Exchanges
  Organizations are continually looking for means to stimulate innovation and creativity, within and across working groups, functions and geographical boundaries. One way to achieve this is through tacit knowledge exchange. This paper argues that The Web may be applied in new, innovative ways to draw dispersed community members together virtually and in particular, to promote tacit knowledge exchanges.