Pamela J Hinds and Sara Kiesler.

Pamela J Hinds and Sara Kiesler, ed Cambridge, MA: MIT Pres 2002 475 pp $5000

Despite the increasing prevalence of organizations staffing important concocts with team members from across the nation and around the globe, academic research forward the effectiveness of these arrangements has remained relatively sparse. Many of us recall Thomas Allen's (1977) Managing the melt of Technology, which alerted us to in what manner the spatial layouts of workplaces can influence who interacts with whom, and, as a flow can affect employee and team productivity. His account emphasized the importance of locating together those who ne to interact with single in kind another. Following this auspicious beginning, however, interest in extending our understanding of space in the workplace appears to have remained rather flat among organizational researchers in the quarter hundred following the publication of Allen's work In the meantime, companies have become more geographically dispersed as they globalize and as distant firms sink Attempting to make the greatest in number of their human capital, these firms increasingly assign concocts to teams of employees working in different offices around the world. Given Allen's findings, common might worry that these arrangements needlessly hamper the efficiency of global organizations. nevertheless the last two decades have also witnessed dramatic improvements in the technologies available for collaborating across distances. Perhaps video conferencing, electronic mail, and instant messaging adequately substitute for co-location.

To reinvigorate this topic, Pamela Hinds and Sara Kiesler have assembled 40 contributors across 18 chapters in Distributed Work. Each of these chapters investigates a certain number of aspect of managing teams of geographically dispersed workers. Relative to many edited masss Hinds and Kiesler's book gathers an unusually cohesive fix of writers--virtually every chapter approaches the issue with the len of a psychologist. What do they conclude? In 25 years, little has changed. Propinquity remains critical to collaboration; trying to coordinate team members across distances can lead to a variety of puzzles that these authors usefully real property in psychological theory. Furthermore, the various electronic media propos as solutions all clearly fail to substitute for face-to-face contact.

Several audiences can appreciate different dimensions of this whirl Managers interested in how to organize throw teams will likely appreciate the clear writing, lack of technical detail, and plethora of stories, although the scarcity of specific recommendations may frustrate them. Researchers can harvest many fruitful topics for application of mind by reviewing the dozens of untest still theoretically motivated propositions offered across the chapters. allowing the editors see the latter as their audience, the body may prove most useful as a source of teaching material for college edifice [i]or[/i] building courses, a fertile environment for the conceptual pieces that dominate the volume

Commenting forward the specific chapters in any edited whirl forces tradeoffs. Instead of briefly mentioning each chapter, I prefer to highlight sum of two units pieces that I found particularly enjoyable. In the same of the few pieces reporting the issues of an experiment, Judith Olson Stephanie Teasley, Lisa Covi, and Gary Olson investigated the efficiency of "radical co-location" on team dynamics and performance. by way of radical co-location, they mean having all team members working in a single compass Though such intimate quarters may strike many of us as too end for comfort, this study rest that these configurations doubled the productivity of the fruits development teams assigned to them. The researchers attributed this tenor to improvements in the common occurrence and depth of communication among members of the team. Moreover, the familiar setting appeared to grow on people; although before taking part in the experiment, participants said they preferr cubicles, afterwards their precedence had shifted to working in a for the use of all team room. Olson and her colleagues, thus, interestingly raise the question of whether firms should stir in the other direction: instead of assembling workers across multiple locations, perhaps they should gather team members in united location and reconfigure their office spaces to allow them to work in a single room

Another intriguing contribution appears in the inferior chapter, in which Michael O'Leary, Wanda Orlikowski, and JoAnne Yates remind us that the last hundred years does not hold a monopoly upon the coordination of work across distances. O'Leary, Orlikowski, and Yates examine the organizational practices of the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) from 1670 to 1826 From its headquarters in London, the HBC managed a far-flung network of outpost across what is now Canada. by the and of a combination of selective recruitment, socialization, and empowerment, the firm gain by efforted distance without the benefit of air travel or e-mail by the agency of fostering an organizational culture that mitigated the question s inherent in managing these distant stations. The authors also helpfully propose how modern managers might learn from HBC's example.