Paul W. L. Vlaar

Cocreating understanding and value in distributed work: how members of onsite and offshore vendor teams give, make, demand, and break sense

Achieving shared, common, or mutual understandings among geographically dispersed workers is a central concern in the distributed work literature. Nonetheless, little is known yet about the socio-cognitive acts and communication processes involved with synchronizing and cocreating understandings in such settings. Building on a case study of a geographically distributed information systems development project at one of Indias largest offshore vendors, we postulate that knowledge and experience asymmetries, and requirements and task characteristics (such as complexity, instability, ambiguity, and novelty) prompt onsite and offshore team members to engage in acts of sensegiving, sensedemanding, and sensebreaking. This allows them to make sense of their tasks and their environment, and it increases the likelihood that congruent and actionable understandings emerge. Furthermore, it assists them in cocreating novel understandings, especially when acts of sensegiving and sensedemanding are complemented with instances of sensebreaking. Our results contribute to the literature by explaining how distributed team members mitigate problems of understanding, transfer preexisting understandings, and cocreate novel understandings. Acts of sensegiving, sensedemanding, and sensebreaking allow distributed team members to jointly explore and generate value, thereby amplifying the performance of distributed workers.

Exploring managerial talk through metaphor: An opportunity to bridge rigour and relevance?

In this article, we elucidate that exploring managerial talk through the lens of metaphor might offer an opportunity to bridge the often acclaimed gap between rigour and relevance in management research and education. Building on an interpretative research approach and a qualitative field study among managers from the Netherlands, Poland and the United States, we reveal that managers view their day-to-day interactions in relationships with suppliers and clients as if they perform acts, play games and fight battles. These findings corroborate extant research, but they also show that combining (a) the use of metaphor as an analytical tool with (b) a focus on managers’ perceptions of their own and others’ micro-level behaviours offers substantial potential for synthesising theory with practice. More specifically, we argue that the layered nature of metaphors – on a primary level helping us imbue meaning to raw observations, and on a theoretical level drawing our attention to potentially interesting constructs – propels confrontation and symbiosis between research and practice. Simultaneously, a focus on micro-level behaviours enhances recognisability for practitioners, while facilitating the emergence of fine-mazed patterns underlying emerging constructs on a theoretical level.

Knowledge Integration in Global R&D Networks

This paper reports a qualitative study conducted at multinational organizations’ R&D departments about their process of knowledge integration. Taking into account the knowledge based view (KBV) of the firm and the practice-based view of knowledge, and building on the literatures concerning specialization and integration of knowledge in organizations, we explore which factors may have a significant influence on the integration process of knowledge between R&D units. The findings indicated (1) the contribution of relevant factors influencing knowledge integration processes and (2) a thoughtful balance between engineering and emergent approaches to be helpful in understanding and overcoming knowledge integration issues.

Developing congruent and actionable understandings in information systems development offshoring relations

The last decade has witnessed a sharp increase in offshore outsourcing activities (Hirschheim et al., 2005), which Robinson and Kalakota (2004: 4) define as “the delegation or subcontracting of administrative, engineering, research, development, or technical support processes to a third-party vendor based in a low-cost location”. Although such activities may entail numerous benefits, compared to conventional outsourcing, offshoring generally faces organizations with additional complications (Carmel and Tjia, 2005; King et al., 2004).

Requirements analysis in offshore is development: remote bridging of differences in understandings

Intensified competition and advances in telecommunications, accompanied with increasing maturity of offshore IT vendors (Carmel and Agarwal 2002; Gartner and Marriot 2003; Hirschheim, et al. 2005), have resulted in the proliferation of Information System Development (ISD) outsourcing. Perceived cost advantages, flexibility, and the availability of a competitive labor pool have compelled various organizations to outsource work to “offshore” countries (Carmel and Agarwal 2002; Robinson and Kalakota 2004). Although traditional ISD outsourcing projects already face challenges related to the notorious complexity of systems development (Brooks 1987; Keil and Mann 2000), to users’ inability to accurately specify requirements (Boland, 1978), and to developers’ inability to elicit requirements from users (Davis 1982; Salaway 1987), offshoring further exacerbates these problems. The distinct backgrounds, experiences, and cultures of participants in offshore relationships (Carmel 1999; Carmel and Tjia 2005) give rise to differences in perceptions, assumptions, and understandings among stakeholders, which tend to be particularly significant during requirements development (Sommerville and Sawyer 1997; Damian and Zowghi 2003). For such projects to become successful, it is imperative that multiple stakeholders develop sufficiently similar understandings of requirements so that the software that is eventually developed by offshore vendor teams is valued by clients and on-site team members.