Dimitrina Dimitrova

Controlling teleworkers: supervision and flexibility revisited

This article revisits the issue of control and autonomy in telework using interviews with professional, managerial and sales teleworkers in a large Canadian telecommunications company. It finds that the changes in control and autonomy are limited to restructuring of the work schedules and the differences across teleworkers are reproduced.

Managing Collaborative Research Networks: The Dual Life of a Virtual Community of Practice

This paper explores how management practices shape the way dispersed communities of practice (CoPs) function. The analysis is a case study of a dispersed community engaged in conducting and managing collaborative research. The analysis uses data from a social network survey and semi-structured interviews to capture the management practices in the community and demonstrate how they are linked to the patterns of information flows and communication.This analysis is a test case for the broader issue of how distributed communities function. It shows that even highly distributed CoPs may have a dual life: they exist both online and offline, in both face-to-face meetings and email exchanges of their participants. The study examines a dispersed community engaged in conducting and managing collaborative research. The analysis uses data from a social network survey and interviews to examine its managerial practices, information exchanges and communication practices.

NAVEL Gazing: Studying a Networked Scholarly Organization

Many North Americans now work in a global economy where corporations foster networked work – with employees participating in multiple teams and often for multiple purposes – and they do so in networked organizations – whose workers may be physically and organizationally dispersed. We analyze networked workers in one networked scholarly organization: the GRAND Network Centre of Excellence. Drawing on qualitative and social network data, we present our preliminary findings at the early stages of GRAND. Early discussions viewed networked organizations as the antithesis of traditional bureaucratic organizations and expected bureaucratic characteristics such as hierarchy, centralization and formalization to be absent and cross-boundary flows – the hallmark of networked organizations – to be prominent. Our research shows that reality is more complex than the early deductive expectations for networked organizations. The GRAND network is well positioned for cross-boundary flows but they are not yet extensive. In the distributed GRAND network, researchers communicate mostly via now-traditional email although in-person contact is almost as frequent. GRAND is designed with few formal hierarchical differences. Yet hierarchy matters when it comes to communication – researchers in higher positions have higher centrality in communication structures, both GRAND-wide and within projects, suggesting consistent advantages in their communication. Cross-disciplinary exchanges in GRAND are low at the network’s early stages, with little collaboration between Computer Science and Engineering, on the one hand, and Social Sciences and Humanities, on the other. Researchers in Arts and Technology emerge as the most active collaborators in the network both internally and externally. Work within provinces is still the norm.

Networked Work and Network Research New Forms of Teamwork in the Triple Revolution

There has been more hype than evidence about networked work. The researchers in the two parts of this double issue issue use survey, interview, and sensor data to present systematic evidence about how networked work actually works. The first part of the issue (April) presents four articles about how professionals network. The second part of the issue (May) focuses on a particular kind of networked work—scholarly networks—including studies of how such networks change over time. Taken together, these articles show that workers tend to network with similar others. Although they integrate digital media into their work lives, they nevertheless tend to work with nearby colleagues.

Networking Scholars in a Networked Organization

Abstract Long-standing traditions of long-distance collaboration and networking make scholars a good test case for differentiating hype and reality in distributed, networked organizations. Our study of Canadian scholars in the GRAND research networks finds that they function more as connected individuals and less as members of a single bounded work group, often meeting their needs by tapping into diversified, loosely knit networks. Their internet use interpenetrates with in-person contact: the more they use one, the more they use the other. Despite digital networking, local proximity is important for collaboration and seniority for inter-team and interdisciplinary boundary spanning.

Changing Ties in a Far-Flung, Multidisciplinary Research Network The Case of GRAND

We study a multidisciplinary, geographically dispersed, and multi-institutional research network that shows the complex relationships in collaborative research. Although collaborative work ties declined, the number of friendship and advice ties stayed stable and acquaintanceship ties grew. Most researchers seem satisfied with the network and relish the opportunities for cross-disciplinary exchanges. The benefits of the network do not lie in the traditional academic output of publications and artifacts, but in intellectual exchanges, knowledge transfer, fostering long-term ties within and across disciplines and universities, and the development of a collaborative culture.

Special Issue Part II: Networked Research

This special issue of American Behavioral Scientist is the second part of a double issue on networked work. The first part of the issue (Volume 59, Issue 4), which appeared in April, presented four papers about how professional employees do networked work. This second part focuses on a particular kind of networked work—scholarly networks—including studies of how such networks change over time. For a full description, we refer the readers to the introduction in the April issue of ABS (Dimitrova & Wellman, 2015). Collaborative research has been steadily growing over several decades: the complexity of scientific issues coupled with increasing specialization, new technological affordances, and changes in science and technology policy as developed countries move to knowledge-based economy have both fostered collaboration among researchers and transformed it. Scientific research is now increasingly done in large, geographically disperesed, multi-institutional, and multi-disciplinary networks. Such research networks are more or less formal structures that function as networked organizations and host researchers who operate in a networked fashion. Researchers combine their primary responsibilities—typically at universities, sometimes at government institutes—often joining multiple research projects in research networks. As research collaborations across locations, institutions, disciplines, and sectors are becoming more common, they generate a steady stream of self-reflecting studies framing new fields of research. Some of these studies are one-time projects such as the Network Assessment and Validation of Effective Leadership (NAVEL), discussed here in two articles. Others become permanent projects or stable organizational structures. For instance, the science of collaboratories—the term commonly used in North America to describe distributed scientific collaboration—is at the center of the work done by the Collaboratory for Research on Electronic Work (CREW) at University of Michigan School of Information. For decades, the collaboratory has led research on how new technologies enable new ways of working and have shaped the research agenda in the study