What is Virtual Work?

What is Virtual Work?

Taken literally, work described as virtual means work that exists "in effect or essence, although not in actual fact or name" (Webster's New World Dictionary). The literal meaning of virtual derives from its use in computer science to describe virtual machine environments and its use in science fiction, where concepts like virtual reality were born. In most contemporary research, the literal definition has been abandoned, allowing the term virtual to acquire many meanings. We briefly review the conventional assumptions about virtual work when applied to teams, organizations, and communities. Following this, we identify alternative conceptions of virtual work that researchers might usefully exploit.

In teams, virtuality has most often been used to describe work that is distributed across time and space (Saunders, 2000; Townsend, DeMarie, & Henrickson, 1998). Because distributed work is enabled by information and communication technologies, virtual teams have also been defined as teams that rely upon electronic communication to accomplish their work. Examples of research on virtual teams date back to the early uses of computer conferencing (Hiltz & Turoff, 1978). Two kinds of studies have become common in recent years: studies of student teams solving hypothetical problems devised by researchers (e.g., Cramton, 2001; Jarvenpaa & Leidner, 1999; Montoya-Weiss, Massey, & Song, 2001) and studies of teams working on real problems in field situations (e.g., Majchrzak, Rice, Malhotra, King, & Ba, 2000; Maznevski & Chudoba, 2000; Robey, Khoo, & Powers, 2000).

The concept of virtual organization is most commonly used to describe organizations that rely upon alliances with business partners (Davidow & Malone, 1992; Grenier & Metes, 1995). Thus, an organization positioned within a network of partners is considered to be virtual because many other organizations perform the functions necessary to service customers (Lucas, 1996). Virtual organizations are able to achieve such coordination through the enabling technologies that link partners together. Virtual organizations are also distributed because the location of alliance partners is immaterial as long as their activities can be coordinated with information technologies.

Although virtual communities have attracted less attention by information systems researchers, they share similar characteristics with virtual teams. That is, members are distributed in time and space and they interact primarily through electronic media. Virtual communities may be organized for professional purposes, or they may exist simply for entertainment value. Our focus in this chapter is on communities with professional interests, such as the open source software community (Raymond, 2001). Virtual communities are interesting because they rely upon voluntary and often unpaid contributions by community members (McClure Wasko & Faraj, 2000). As such, the vitality of virtual communities depends more upon social capital than upon the authoritative mechanisms that govern teams and organizations (Adler, 2001).

The treatments of virtuality described above appear to be achieving some consensus. However, it is premature to exclude other ways of defining virtual work. Schultze and Orlikowski (2001) reviewed the professional literature on virtual organizations to reveal a wide variety of definitions and their underlying metaphors. They identified five metaphors of virtual organizing: platform, space, bits, community, and network. Clearly, authors have not converged on a single metaphor or definition of virtuality.

For example, Mowshowitz (1997, 2002) defined virtual organization as the separation of work requirements from the ways in which requirements are met. Separating these elements allows organizations to switch from one way of meeting a requirement to others that may be more cost-effective. Switching requires "management activities that explore and track the abstract requirements needed to realize some objective while simultaneously, but independently, investigating and specifying the concrete means for satisfying the abstract requirements" (Mowshowitz, 1997, p. 33). In practice, this definition of virtual organization invites inquiries into the ways in which organizations contract with other organizations that can provide essential functions, such as order fulfillment, customer service, logistics, and others, without becoming part of the organization seeking to satisfy customer requirements.

A second alternative definition of virtuality is to treat work as consisting of two separate but interrelated layers of activity. For example, Turoff (1997) claimed that computers do not simply represent reality but rather provide a new reality that differs from other experience. Information technology's mediation of relationships among human actors allows reality to become "what we negotiate it to be" (Turoff, p. 41), potentially deviating from previous experience in organizations. Thus, transactions mediated by information technology in a virtual layer of reality may have material consequences in the physical world. In essence, virtual work becomes a new, alternative reality, an "imploded view" of an organization that "re-presents" reality in a qualitatively different way (Sotto, 1997). This dual-layer view of organizations draws attention to the relationships between virtual, technology-mediated work and material work. Virtual work may reinforce and complement physical work or even produce new synergies (Robey, Schwaig, & Jin, 2003).

Treating virtual work as a duality draws attention to the notions of time-space configuration and time-space edge, as formulated by Giddens (1984, 1990, 1991). While place connotes boundedness, localness, and particularity, space is more universal, generalizable, and abstract (Schultze & Boland, 2000). Because the social systems for organizing work increasingly engage both place and space, it is useful to conceive of them as time-space configurations. According to this view, work may be conceived as both transcendent of temporal and spatial barriers (the virtual layer) while also situated and anchored in local, physical reality (Cramton, 2001; Jin & Robey, 2002; Rennecker, 2002). Inevitably, work involving both layers depends upon the navigation of the edges between these two types of social systems. Giddens defined time-space edge as the "interconnections, and differentials of power, found between different societal types" (1984, p. 164). Time-space edges can exist in both virtual and material layers, and there may be significant costs associated with bridging time-space edges within and between layers (Jin & Robey, 2002).

In sum, definitions of virtual work do not need to conform to conventional uses. Researchers must carefully define what is meant by virtual. Researchers must also carefully distinguish between concepts of virtuality at the team, organization, and community levels of analysis. Although virtuality may have similar functions at all three levels of analysis, the functions may be represented quite differently at each level (Morgeson & Hofmann, 1999).