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.
