In this paper we analyzed an online community based on a mailing list that was created as an internal marketing tool for launching a new network service. We focused on the change in communication over time among dispersed Sales representatives and the employees in a centralized Service...

We investigated how sales representatives (Salespeople) and members of a service business development department (the Service Dept.) communicated within an informal online community, particularly in relation to their use of other informal and formal communication channels. We found that while...

In Schumpeterian terms, entrepreneurship is a force of creative destruction, and entrepreneurs are risk-takers who pioneer an innovation - typically a technological innovation but also possibly an organizational innovation. Such entrepreneurs are often true-believers in the innovation, and...

We proposed four categories for a set of activities that integrate both practices and processes: practice, recorded practice, endorsed process, and mandated process. We considered their usefulness for explaining phenomena, including change over time. We then applied them to a case in which a...

Our empirical study of an interactive marketing company explores how post-industrial work is constituted through the ongoing daily activities of organizational actors drawing on diverse backgrounds to accomplish project-based work. These actors engage in four types of work practices: negotiating...

This paper explores the critical role of conversational threads in facilitating the ongoing, distributed work of one virtual organization. In studying the electronic mail exchanges of organizational members during one year, we found that they engaged in a range of threading activity to establish...

Standard setting has been among the nuts and bolts of globalizing industrial capitalism since its beginning, assuring that things needing to work together fit from product to product, industry to industry, and country to country. The foci of the first two of the now 229 technical committees of...