alphabetically, but authorship is shared equally. The research described in this paper has

This study is part of an ongoing comparative study of various types of open software communities including both free and open source software projects. This study examines how the organizational cultural beliefs and values of a free software virtual organization influence software development processes. It provides examples that illustrate the importance of personal motivation and a sense of working as a team in the perpetuation of a virtual work community. It presents the world of the GNUenterprise.org project as a virtual organizational culture that embodies the beliefs of free software and freedom of choice, and the values of community building and cooperative work. A close study of this project shows how these beliefs and values are manifested in software development methods, artifacts, and tool choice, as well as how dispersed developers cooperate and resolve conflict in a virtual community. Data collection includes the content analysis of Internet Relay Chat archives; kernel cousins archives (summary digests of IRC and mailing list archives); mailing list archives; email interviews; Web site documents and observations; and personal interviews conducted at two open source conferences. Two cases from IRC and mailing list archives of the GNUe virtual community at work are presented for in-depth analyses and comparison. Cultural beliefs and values combined with

recognizing the individual makeup of persons with respect to culture. Using SIT (or other theory bases) as grounding for cultural research programs implies the use of certain methodological approaches. Each study would have to establish the salient "cultures" in each individual's background and include these different "cultures" as independent variables in positivist research. In qualitative research, there would need to be an equally rigorous assessment of the cultural identifiers of each individual. INTRODUCTION Globalization of business highlights the need to understand the management of organizations that span different nations and cultures. In modern multinational, transnational organizations, information technology (IT) must be utilized to achieve efficiencies, coordination, and communication. Clearly, though, cultural differences between countries impact the effectiveness and efficiency of this IT deployment. A study of cultural conflicts, therefore, is of

Management research on diversity, heterogeneity, dissimilarity, and related concepts of within unit differences in organizations has proliferated in the past decade. However, few clear or consistent findings have emerged. We argue that the nature of these difference-based constructs requires closer examination. Using diversity as an overarching term, we contend that it has three distinctive types: separation, variety, or disparity. Failure to recognize the unique meaning, maximum shape, and assumptions underlying each type has held back theory development and contributed to mismatched operationalizations and research design. After presenting our diversity typology, we present guidelines for conceptualization, measurement, and theory testing, highlighting the special case of demographic diversity.

Leonardi, Paul M. (M.A. Communication) The Mythos of Engineering Culture: A Study of Communicative Performances and Interaction Thesis directed by Assistant Professor Michele H. Jackson Across a wide variety of literatures, researchers consistently identify similar values and practices that characterize "engineering culture." Engineers themselves are aware that they belong to a professional culture that sets explicit guidelines for what it means to be an engineer. The amazing coherence and persistence of engineering culture suggests that there is a certain mythos surrounding it. Recently, professional engineering associations and engineering scholars have pointed to the importance of group work in the field of engineering and have suggested that engineers are not adequately prepared to work well with others. As Barley (1996) contends, the nature of work in the U.S. is changing dramatically and the most serious barriers to adapting successfully to these changes are likely to be cultural. Moreover, in passing, recent engineering scholars have suggested that the culture of engineering may impeded the collaborative process of a team (Ingram & Parker, 2002). This thesis explores the intersections between engineering culture and group interaction by examining the ways in which the mythos of engineering culture plays out in communicative performance. Through interviews and participant observation iv of engineering students at the University of Colorado, I adopt a cultural communicative performance perspective (Pacanowsky & O'Donnell-Trujillo, 1983) to study how the mythos of engineering culture is performed in engineers' interactions with one another. This study shows that the mythos of engineering culture does shape the communicative performances constitutive of engineering c...

this paper. Our analysis of contradictions leads us to propose alternative theoretical approaches to BPR research and practice. Theories that employ a "logic of contradiction" are likely to offer greater insight into contradictory practices such as BPR, as well as the more general issue of organizational change (Ford and Ford, 1994; Poole and Van de Ven, 1989; Robey, 1995; Van de Ven and Poole, 1995). Thus, rather than adding to the criticism of BPR, we seek to understand BPR's logical inconsistencies and contradictory results. We argue that a better theoretical understanding can improve both empirical research on BPR's implications for organizational performance and, ultimately, applied re-engineering efforts

Abstract-Strategies and policies for the adoption and development of interorganizational systems require further understanding of the theoretical background to these systems. An argument is made for development of theory that is multi-level, processual and has an emergent perspective. Such theory is needed to deal with a context where environmental influences are important in addition to complex interactions between organizational activities at the micro-level and industry structure at the macro-level. The use of structuration theory as a vehicle to advance further understanding is explored. An illustration is given of application of this theory in the development of supply chain management in the beef industry. I.

In this paper we propose a theory of the cultural evolution of the firm. We apply cultural and evolutionary thinking to the questions posed by theories of the firm: What are firms and why do they exist? We argue that firms are best thought of as cultures, as social distributions of modes of thought and forms of externalization. Using the term meme to refer collectively to cultural modes of thought—ideas, beliefs, assumptions, values, interpretive schema, and know-how—we describe culture as a social phenomena, patterns of symbolic communication and behavior that are produced as members of the group enact the memes they have acquired as part of the culture. Memes spread from mind to mind as they are enacted and the resulting cultural patterns are observed and interpreted by others. The uncertainties of interpretation and the possibilities of reinterpretation and recontextualization create variation in the memes as they spread. Over time, firms evolve as a process of the selection, variation, and retention of memes. Our claim is that understanding firms in this way provides a new perspective— what we call the meme’s-eye view—on the question of why we have the firms we have and, by allowing us to shed the functionalist assumptions shared by both economics and knowledge-based theories of the firm, makes possible a genuinely descriptive, as opposed to normative, theory of why we have the firms that we have.

Cultural differences are often used as explanations of organizational problems following mergers. This paper argues that this literature is to a large extent based on a realist epistemology where too little emphasis has been placed on the constructive processes. To partially bridge this gap, this study adopts a sensemaking approach to studying the (re)construction of cultural conceptions in the merger context. The study is based on extensive ethnographic material from eight cases of Finnish-Swedish mergers and acquisitions. The analysis of this material leads to a specification of three concurrent cultural sensemaking processes through which the top decision makers involved in the post-merger integration processes make sense of and enact cultural conceptions. First, this cultural sensemaking involves a search for rational understanding of cultural characteristics and differences. Second, cultural sensemaking also includes more or less suppressed emotional identification with either of the merging sides. Third, cultural sensemaking also involves purposeful manipulation of the cultural conceptions for more or less legitimate purposes. Based on this distinction, this study leads to specific propositions concerning how cultural conceptions are formed in post-merger organizations.

: This research poses the following basic research question: What is the value of emotional and informational responsiveness in service interactions and what are their antecedents? Through a cross-sectional study of 250 service interactions, this dissertation provides evidence regarding individual and environmental differences in emotional and informational responsiveness in service interactions. The research design is multi-method and field-based. The data include transcribed and coded audio recordings of the service interactions, as well as surveys and standardized tests of individual service representatives. In addition to the recordings, organizational and customer evaluations of the interactions are used to answer the research questions. Participant observation and focus groups are used to get a richer sense of the nature of the work in general, and of the emotional and informational labor performed. In preliminary analyses, tests of the models of the antecedents and outcomes of ...