VOSS: Innovating Across Cultures in Virtual Organizations

VOSS：虚拟组织中的跨文化创新

• 批准号: 1025761
• 负责人: Paul Dourish
• 金额: $ 40万
• 依托单位: University of California-Irvine
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2010
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2010-09-01 至 2014-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1025761&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: VOSS; Innovating; Across; Cultures; Virtual

Global collaborations in innovation work are increasingly pervasive and require new forms of virtual organizing. Geographically dispersed projects simultaneously enable novel forms of work, while introducing distance and difference that can cause conflict and confusion. Innovation work, focused on creative practices and exploration of complex and little-known decision spaces, is particularly challenging in these settings, since ambiguity and openness are inherent parts of the process.This research investigates the social and organizational practices that people employ to work effectively in the face of challenges of distance, cultural separation, temporal pressure, and ambiguity. Specifically, we investigate these practices ethnographically, drawing on Peter Galison?s concept of trading zones as a conceptual framework to examine innovation work across cultures. We build upon and extend a prior study of transnational and intercultural design, in which we encountered three areas of activity to which people attended ? cohesion work (maintaining common understandings and a sense of shared purpose), infrastructure work (sustaining the material conditions of mutual action), and pidgin work (creating of shared languages and patterns of communication). This research takes these initial observations as a starting point for an extensive engagement with intercultural innovation in temporary virtual organizations.Our research provides a clear view of how cross-cultural collaboration and exchange are accomplished in creative work. Studying existing everyday practices gives us a view into how people configure and orient around existing infrastructures, how they establish patterns and practices of interaction and exchange, and how they maintain coherent group identity and purpose ? in short, how virtual organizing is accomplished in the context of social and material contingencies. Our findings will inform the design and deployment of cyberinfrastructure in virtual organizations, especially when cultural considerations are at play.

创新工作中的全球合作越来越普遍，需要新形式的虚拟组织。地理上分散的项目同时使新的工作形式成为可能，同时引入了可能导致冲突和混乱的距离和差异。创新工作，专注于创造性的实践和探索的复杂和鲜为人知的决策空间，是特别具有挑战性的，在这些设置，因为模糊性和开放性的过程中固有的组成部分。本研究调查的社会和组织的做法，人们采用有效的工作，面对距离的挑战，文化分离，时间压力，和模糊性。具体来说，我们调查这些做法人种学，借鉴彼得？的概念，贸易区作为一个概念框架，检查跨文化的创新工作。我们建立和扩展跨国和跨文化的设计，在我们遇到的三个活动领域，人们参加了以前的研究？凝聚力工作（保持共同理解和共同目标感）、基础设施工作（维持相互行动的物质条件）和洋泾浜工作（创造共同的语言和交流模式）。本研究以这些初步观察为出发点，广泛参与跨文化创新的临时虚拟组织。我们的研究提供了一个清晰的视角，跨文化合作和交流是如何在创造性的工作完成。研究现有的日常实践使我们了解人们如何围绕现有的基础设施进行配置和定位，他们如何建立互动和交换的模式和实践，以及他们如何保持一致的群体身份和目的？简而言之，虚拟组织是如何在社会和物质突发事件的背景下完成的。我们的研究结果将为虚拟组织中网络基础设施的设计和部署提供信息，特别是当文化因素起作用时。