Virtual organization and perceived availability: The case of manufacturing assistance providers

With the advance of information technologies and mediated channels for communication, new ways of organizing are possible. Despite human need and proclivity for face to face communication, strong ties develop and are maintained (at least in part) through mediated channels tied by bonds of trust and common interests rather than proximity and formal structure, systems based on virtual organization transcend the boundaries of time and space. The process of virtual organization suggests that the apparent dichotomy between proximate and mediated communication should be replaced with a model that remakes the forms communication can take into complementary categories of experience rather than mutually exclusive contexts.;Virtual organization is a process of social construction (Gergen, 1985) for a system grounded in shared rules and resources (Giddens, 1981) that creates and maintains the availability of all task-relevant actors and objects in the minds of its members. To understand this process and its outcomes as they relate to perceptions of availability, elements of cognitive and structuration theory are integrated under the perspective of social construction. Cognitive theory addresses how behavior production occurs through memory processes, while structuration theory explains how the categories, norms, and routines used by individuals arise and are reinforced by social interaction. The content of memory at all levels above the most basic is a product of social construction; new memory traces are determined by the structural lens through which social actors perceive the physical world. Structures are the expected patterns of physical sensations that elicit meaning at multiple levels of abstraction. The key structure created by virtual organization is the actor's perception of available others who share the same purposes, as embodied in a transactive memory system (Wegner, 1987). It is this perceived network of available others that makes virtual organization possible for individual actors.;This dissertation seeks to answer three questions: What structures are created by virtual organization? How do these structure come into being? What changes does virtual organization bring about in existing structures? These questions are explored through an instrumental case study (Stake, 1995) of manufacturing assistance providers who were recruited by a university project (NEM Online) developing online resources and services to improve the global competitiveness of Michigan manufacturers. Drawing on the author's personal experience as a member of NEM Online, archival documents of NEM Online's development, two network surveys, and interviews with assistance providers, this dissertation describes the world of assistance providers and identifies how they come to perceive certain resources as available. Perceived availability is identified as the mental labels actors have for objects and people, which are cued by the categories people apply to inquiries and reinforced by their movement through an interaction space defined by time schedules instead of territory. The theoretical perspective is found to be sufficient for analysis at the program, relationship and sequence levels of control, but in need of more detailed theory to frame research at more concrete memory levels.