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An ethnographic study of a team of software developers working on a new product across two groups—located on the West Coast of the United States and in Bangalore, India—is used to analyze status dynamics in distributed groups. Whereas existing literature has emphasized the importance of communication, task design, and incentives for cooperation, this paper shows how status differentials and geographic distance reinforce each other to affect the work processes and collaboration in distributed teams. The focus is on two elements: the relationship between the collaboration across the two groups and their members and the members' interpretations of this relationship. Status influences the perceptions of the remote group, as well as the willingness to cooperate with its members. The key findings specify the informal closure strategies used by the high-status group in relation to the low-status group. Furthermore, the superimposition of geographic and status distance in remote work lowered the cost of exclusion of one group from the collaboration and led to the deepening of status differences between remote groups. By showing status to be both an input and an output of intergroup relations, the paper specifies some of the mechanisms through which status orderings are maintained and reinforced.

We advance understandings of knowledge transfer by showing the central role of symbolic action, taking the form of ritual, in contexts characterized by worldview differences. Using qualitative data from interactions between farming communities in rural Ghana and agriculture development specialists, we examine how rituals do relational work that enables informational work. We find that rituals (i.e., visits, value affirmations, gift-giving, prayer, performing, storytelling) do so by means of their functions–bracketing worldview differences, modeling collaboration between farmers and agriculture development specialists, and packaging new knowledge in displays of compatibility. Our work also expands scholarship on the role of rituals in organizations and on management practices in Africa. Overall, our paper offers a complex, comprehensive view of knowledge transfer as involving both relational and informational work and relying on both symbolic action and tangible elements.

This book demonstrates the power of writing in informal and formal organizations in the past and the present. It shows how writing, despite long lasting criticisms that can be traced back to Plato, and in spite of its frequent definition as a mere recording medium is in fact a creative mode of communication that supports the expression of emotions, the developing knowledge, and the building of strong communities among faraway individuals. The first part of the book illustrates how this has been true historically. The focus on writing as a fundamental mode of communication - the other being speech or the oral mode - is still important in our technology-infused world, where writing seems to have been reduced to short cryptic text messages or tweets. Precisely because of their heavy reliance on technology, current practices are in need of a deeper understanding that focus on deep as opposed to surface features and unveil the four essential mechanisms - objectification, reflecting, specifying, and addressing - that give writing its creative powers. In the second part of the book, we use contemporary case studies and interviews to illustrate how shifting our focus from the media to the mode of communication and focusing on the mechanisms of writing allows us to go beyond current debates about the capabilities of various communication media and to understand better today's communicative practices. This book is an attempt to unveil the powers of writing as well as to highlight the implications for organizations of the potential loss of these powers in today's world where writing-based distributed collaborations, interpersonal relationships, and online communities are key sources of innovation and support for individuals and organizations.

Distributed collaborations face significant dialogical challenges: sharing knowledge, questioning ideas, and developing new solutions. These challenges are often associated with collaborations' reliance on written communication such as emails and documents, which are not seen as conducive to the rich dialogues necessary for effective collaboration. However, numerous successful distributed collaborations exist despite their sometimes exclusive reliance on written communication. Based on a qualitative study of distributed collaboration in two contexts—an organization effectively coordinating work across two continents and a pair of scientists working together to develop a new theory—we examine how writing supports dialogue, and thus collaboration, among distant partners. Our analysis of the correspondences exchanged in these two historical distributed collaborations identifies four mechanisms of writing—objectifying, contextualizing, specifying, and reflecting—and shows how they support dialogue and so address the dialogical challenges involved in distributed collaboration. These findings are particularly relevant in our era of technology-mediated communication where even collaborations in colocated settings rely extensively on written communication. Our findings advance our understanding of fundamental aspects of distributed collaboration and propose to rethink the value of written communication in enacting dialogue and supporting collaboration at a distance.

Based on a comparative field study of two software development projects, we use ethnographic methods of observation and interview to examine the question of how interdependent individuals develop and maintain mutual focus of attention on a shared task, which we define as the group engagement process. Drawing on Randall Collins' interaction ritual theory, we identify how mutual focus of attention develops through the presence of a task bubble that focuses attention by creating barriers to outsiders and through the effective use of task-related artifacts. Shared emotion both results from mutual focus of attention and reinforces it. Through our comparison between the two projects, we show that the group engagement process is enabled by factors at the individual (individual engagement), interaction (frequency and informality of interactions), and project (compelling direction of the overall group) levels. Our focus on group interaction episodes as the engine of the group engagement process illuminates what individuals do when they are performing the focal work of the group (i.e., solving problems related to the task at hand) and how they develop and sustain the mutual focus of attention that is required for making collective progress on the task itself. We also show the relationship between the group engagement process and effective problem solving.

We examine how interaction between mid-level managers in technical committees facilitates subsequent alliance formation in a longitudinal study of 87 cellular service providers and equipment manufacturers. Joint participation by firms in technical committees helps them identify potential alliance partners and particular opportunities for technical collaboration. This effect is magnified by sustained participation by individuals on behalf of their firms, demonstrating that interfirm relationships are enhanced by the interpersonal bonds that are forged in technical committees. In contrast, we find that the effect of joint technical committee participation on alliance formation decreases as firms have more prior alliances, suggesting that technical committees provide a more critical avenue for knowledge exchange when firms do not have the luxury of exchanging information through contractual linkages. Taken together, these findings suggest one venue where managerial action can transform existing social structure, because technical committee activity facilitates the entry of less-established firms into alliance networks.