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In many corporations today, it is common to have teams with members located in different geographic locations, different time zones, and even different countries. These virtual teams are strategically important to organizations as they adapt to constantly changing market and political conditions such as global outsourcing. Despite the research and investment in technologies supporting virtual work, it remains unclear how virtuality, or the conditions under which virtual teams work, affects performance. Prior research suggests performance of virtual teams runs the gamete from failure to success. A global understanding of the specific impacts of virtual work on performance, positive or negative, remains elusive because researchers have not yet ascertained which aspects of virtuality are especially relevant in a given setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employees in global corporations are increasingly involved in ‘virtual teams’ on a regular basis. Conflicting definitions of virtuality make it hard to measure such things as how much virtual teaming occurs and how virtual teaming affects performance. As a consequence, it is hard to allocate funding and to design infrastructures and software to support this specific mode of working. Using the concept of discontinuities, or changes in expected conditions, we propose a virtuality index to assess how ‘virtual’ a given setting is. The discontinuities used include geography, time zone, organization, national culture, work practices, and technology. The index separately measures these aspects of virtuality and their effect on perceived team performance. Data collected at a large multinational corporation clustered into three overarching discontinuities: team distribution, workplace mobility, and variety of work practices. The study revealed that being distributed in and of itself had no impact on self-assessed team performance. Work practice predictability and sociability mitigated effects of working in discontinuous environments, while variety of practices (cultural and work process diversity) and employee mobility negatively impacted performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Asserts how Internet communications alters cultural processes and provides alternative realities that displace the socially grounded ones of everyday synchronous discourse. Parallel approaches to the study of Internet behavior; Role of anonymity in the fragmented self; Discussion of the main underpinning premises of a cyberculture.

The article presents the author's views on Claudio Ciborra, chair of the Department of Information Systems at the London School of Economics (LSE), London, England. He recounts about his last meeting in person with Claudio at a conference, which he co-chaired for an IFIP Working Group in Ireland in 2004. Claudio's presence at the conference was very notable. The event was full of discontinuities and edgy diversity. It combined people from the industry inexperienced with IFIP working groups, with academics, and it brought together a small tightly knit base community with both the industry environment and broader academic participation. He protests against seemingly all U.S.-based research, and, in particular, those people who had disappointed him by going only halfway towards some intellectual standards he quite reasonably had. The panel he directed also was a call for deep context, advocacy and "first, do no harm" for information systems research and applications. In terms of the particular contributions of Claudio as a scholar and person, nothing is more eloquent than the testimonials posted on the LSE website dedicated to his memory.

Presents letters to the editor on nursing.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue including one by Jacqueline Day on the relationship of the IT department with other parts of the industry, another by Marcel Veenswijk and Cristina Chisalita on the importance of power and ideology in communities of practice and one by Terry Nolan, Ray Brizland and Linda Macaulay on online participation in an online business community.