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Electronic communication has been proposed as a key technology enabling new organization forms and structures, work designs, and task processes. This view assumes that organization structure and form can be defined in terms of communication linkages among organizational units. Communication is a social process, however. Therefore, to better understand the potential for these technologies to enable fundamental organizational change, we must understand how existing structures and social contexts influence patterns of organizational communication. This research examined the use of electronic messaging by ongoing management groups performing a cooperative task. By means of an in-depth multimethod field study of the editorial group of two daily newspapers, it examined the influence of the groups' social context on the patterns of face-to-face and computer-mediated communication. The results show that different groups using the same functional structure and performing the same task with identical communication technologies, but operating within different social contexts, appropriated the communication technology differently and in a way that was consistent with and reinforcing to their existing social structure. This finding suggests that researchers must, at the very least, explicitly take into account social context when studying the effects of introducing technologies which may alter group interaction. Additionally, researchers should look to social context as an important explanatory construct to be explicitly varied and investigated with regard to effects and outcomes of these technologies. The findings also suggest that managers must diagnose and explicitly manage the social context of the workplace prior to implementing technologies, if their intent is to restructure the patterns of interaction and information exchange in support of new organizational forms.

In a business management game, variation of administrative techniques can affect students' attitudes toward the simulation and their performance in the game. Dr. McKenney is Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Industrial Administration at Harvard. His specialty is the field of production. Dr. Dill, formerly Associate Dean of the Graduate School of Industrial Administration at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, is one of the inventors of the Carnegie Tech Management Game and has written extensively on the game. He is currently Director of the program for executives at IBM in White Plains, New York.