Research

Power relationships and e-mail communication

An organization is a network of power relationships. In a power relationship, one actor possesses power over another when they have something that the other desires, and when they have the freedom to deal with the other in a way that the other may not have intended or even wanted [1]. Established members of organizations are likely to know what other members have power, what the nature of that power is (expertise, knowledge, social connections, hierarchy or otherwise), and where they are in the social network in relation to those other members. This knowledge helps them to choose effective strategies in cooperative and competitive games such as knowledge acquisition and sharing. We can partially reveal such networks from organizational e-mail archives via analysis of e-mail content and via consideration of metadata about senders and receivers.

Shared context in virtual organizations

The arrival of cheap, global, nearly universally accessible networks and telecommunications infrastructure has inspired organizations to think about "going virtual:" to free themselves from the restrictions of having all necessary personnel be located in the same geographical place, working at the same time. Instead, they have begun moving towards a model of teams that may be geographically distributed and cross-functional, that possess workers from different cultures (organizational and social), and that tend to be built, disbanded and reformed to suit the task or project at hand. Such teams communicate nearly exclusively via electronic communication media. While today it is traditional organizations (which are organized around functional groupings) who are forming virtual teams within them, researchers have proposed that a necessary and probable evolution is towards completely virtual organizations "that act as a "collaborative network of people" working together, regardless of location or who "owns" them" [2, p. 693].