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Although organizational theorists have long argued that environments shape organizational structures, they have paid little attention to the processes by which the shaping occurs. This paper examines these processes by showing how environments shape teaching and learning activities, which in turn shape structure. Observational field data from structural engineering groups in three firms and hardware engineering groups in three firms revealed that the two occupations exhibited different patterns of learning episodes and different distributions of actors across those episodes, or what, following the work of Roger Barker, we call two distinct teaching-learning ecologies. After detailing the differences in the two ecologies, we show how these differences emerged from patterns of behavior that were influenced by unique sets of environmental and technological constraints. By demonstrating how actions transform environmental constraints into organizational structure, this paper indicates how research on individual learning in organizations can speak to larger concerns in organizational theory. Moreover, by adopting a synthetic and pragmatic approach to individual learning as a social activity, the paper highlights the role of teachers in workplace learning and casts doubts on the existence of a universal model of how individuals learn at work.

The bulk of our understanding of teams is based on traditional teams in which all members are collocated and communicate face to face. However, geographically distributed teams, whose members are not collocated and must often communicate via technology, are growing in prevalence. Studies from the field are beginning to suggest that geographically distributed teams operate differently and experience different outcomes than traditional teams. For example, empirical studies suggest that distributed teams experience high levels of conflict. These empirical studies offer rich and valuable descriptions of this conflict, but they do not systematically identify the mechanisms by which conflict is engendered in distributed teams. In this paper, we develop a theory-based explanation of how geographical distribution provokes team-level conflict. We do so by considering the two characteristics that distinguish distributed teams from traditional ones: Namely, we examine how being distant from one's team members and relying on technology to mediate communication and collaborative work impacts team members. Our analysis identifies antecedents to conflict that are unique to distributed teams. We predict that conflict of all types (task, affective, and process) will be detrimental to the performance of distributed teams, a result that is contrary to much research on traditional teams. We also investigate conflict as a dynamic process to determine how teams might mitigate these negative impacts over time.

We analyze information and communication technology in education initiatives in two South American countries: Bolivia and Uruguay. Utilizing qualitative data collection and analysis methods, we construct a comparative case study to trace the path of how national discourses—in response to the idea of globalization and initiatives promoting computers in education—were translated into policy goals, strategic implementation plans, and teaching and learning practices and outcomes. We document the role of the selected information and communication technology's materiality in terms of portability and connectivity along this translation path. Our findings point to the importance of considering national discourse, often overlooked in information and communication technology in education studies, when examining initiative success and failure, and of conceptualizing materiality as more than merely the infrastructural foundation upon which information and communication technology in education initiatives are built. Understanding the role that materiality plays in interaction with national discourse may be especially important in guiding successful information and communication technology in education initiatives in developing countries, where financial resources are limited.

In this paper, we broaden the concept of interdependence beyond its focus on task to include technology, defining technology interdependence as technologies' interaction with and dependence on one another in the course of carrying out work. With technologies increasingly aiding knowledge work, understanding technology interdependence may be as important as understanding task interdependence for theories of organizing, but the literature has yet to develop ways of thinking about technology interdependence or its impact on the social dynamics of work. We define a technology gap as the space in a workflow between two technologies wherein the output of the first technology is meant to be the input to the second one. Using data from an inductive study of two engineering occupations (hardware engineering and structural engineering), we analyzed engineers' gap encounters (episodes in which a technology gap appeared in the course of action) and found striking differences in how engineers minded the gaps. Hardware engineers minded the gaps by coordinating technologies via "bridges" that automated data transfers between technologies. Structural engineers, in contrast, allowed technology gaps to persist even though traversing gaps consumed significant time and effort. Our findings highlight a difference between task and technology in the degree of coordination necessary for success. Managers in our study designed policies around technology interdependence and coordination not to manage technology most efficiently, but to manage work and workers in a manner consistent with occupational structures and industry constraints. We discuss the implications of our findings for theories of organizing work.

Although organizational scholars have begun to study virtual work, they have yet to fully grapple with its diversity. We draw on semiotics to distinguish among three types of virtual work (virtual teams, remote control, and simulations) based on what it is that a technology makes virtual and whether work is done with or on, through, or within representations. Of the three types, simulations have been least studied, yet they have the greatest potential to change work's historically tight coupling to physical objects. Through a case study of an automobile manufacturer, we show how digital simulation technologies prompted a shift from symbolic to iconic representation of vehicle performance. The increasing verisimilitude of iconic simulation models altered workers' dependence on each other and on physical objects, leading management to confound operating within representations with operating with or on representations. With this mistaken understanding, and lured by the virtual, managers organized simulation work in virtual teams, thereby distancing workers from the physical referents of their models and making it difficult to empirically validate models. From this case study, we draw implications for the study of virtual work by examining how changes to work organization vary by type of virtual work.

Technologies are changing at a rapid pace and in unpredictable ways. The scale of their impact is also far-reaching. Technologies such as artificial intelligence, data analytics, robotics, digital platforms, social media, blockchain, and 3-D printing affect many parts of the organization simultaneously, enabling new interdependencies within and between units and with actors that many organizations have typically considered to be outside their boundaries. Consequently, today's emerging technologies have the potential to fundamentally shape all aspects of organizing. This article introduces the special issue "Emerging Technologies and Organizing." We treat these new technologies as "emerging" because their uses and effects are still varied and have yet to stabilize around a recognizable set of patterns and because the technologies themselves are, by design, always changing and adapting. To theorize the relationship between emerging technologies and organizing, we draw on relational thinking in philosophy and sociology to develop a relational perspective on emerging technologies. Our goal in doing so is to create a new way for organizational scholars to incorporate the ever-increasing role of technology in their theorizing of key organizational processes and phenomena. By developing a relational perspective that treats emerging technologies not as stable entities, but as a set of evolving relations, we provide a novel way for organizational scholars to account for the role of technology in their topics of interest. We sketch the outlines of this relational perspective on emerging technologies and discuss the implications it has for what organizational scholars study and how we study it.