Barry Wellman
University of Toronto, Canada
wellman@chass.utoronto.ca
ARTICLE ABSTRACT
What is the nature of networked organizations? The focus of discussions of the networked organization has been on the boundary spanning nature of these new organizational structures. What has remained unclear is the role of the group in these networked organizations. Furthermore, little is known about how computer-mediated communication is used to bridge group and organizational boundaries. In particular, the role of new media in the context of existing communication patterns has received little attention. We examine how employees at a high-tech company referred to as KME communicate with members of the work group, other colleagues in the organization, and colleagues outside the organization to determine the nature of boundary spanning communication. In addition, at each communication distance we examine the use of different media for communication to determine the role of computer-mediated communication (email and instant messaging) versus traditional means of communication (face-to-face and the phone) in the networked organization. Do employees have the trust to communicate over boundaries using ICTs? We find that boundary spanning communication has not replaced communication with members of the work group at KME. By contrast, a large proportion of communication continues to occur within the boundary of the work group and organization. Surprisingly, these communications within the boundary of the work group and organization take place via computer-mediated means and not via traditional face-to-face and phone interactions. Computer-mediated communication is also used extensively for external communication. The findings suggest that organizations have only partially moved toward a pure form of the networked organization. We propose glocalization as an alternative perspective for understanding these new forms of work: local involvement with global reach. We term the high local reliance on computer-mediated communication local virtualities.