VOSS: Innovating Across Cultures in Virtual Organizations

创新工作中的全球合作日益普遍，需要新的虚拟组织形式。地理上分散的项目同时实现了新颖的工作形式，同时引入了可能导致冲突和混乱的距离和差异。在这种情况下，专注于创造性实践和探索复杂和鲜为人知的决策空间的创新工作尤其具有挑战性，因为模糊性和开放性是这一过程的固有部分。本研究调查了人们在面对距离、文化分离、时间压力和模糊性的挑战时有效工作的社会和组织实践。具体来说，我们从民族志的角度研究这些做法，借鉴彼得·盖里森？S的概念，贸易区作为一个概念性框架来检查跨文化的创新工作。我们建立并扩展了先前对跨国和跨文化设计的研究，其中我们遇到了人们参加的三个活动领域？凝聚力工作（维持共同的理解和共同的目标感），基础设施工作（维持相互行动的物质条件），以及混杂语工作（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，广泛研究临时虚拟组织中的跨文化创新。我们的研究为跨文化合作和交流如何在创造性工作中完成提供了一个清晰的视角。研究现有的日常实践可以让我们了解人们如何配置和定位现有的基础设施，他们如何建立交互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偶然性的背景下完成的。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参考，特别是当文化因素在起作用时。

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.