Giant strides in information technology at the turn of the century may have unleashed unreachable goals. With the invention of groupware, people expect to communicate easily with each other and accomplish difficult work even though they are remotely located or rarely overlap in time. Major corporations launch global teams, expecting that technology will make “virtual collocation” possible. Federal research money encourages global science through the establishment of “collaboratories. ” We review over 10 years of field and laboratory investigations of collocated and noncollocated synchronous group collaborations. In particular, we compare collocated work with remote work as it is possible today and comment on the promise of remote work tomorrow. We focus on the sociotechnical conditions required for effective distance work and bring together the results with four key concepts: common ground, coupling of work, collaboration readiness, and collaboration technology readiness. Groups with high common ground and loosely coupled work, with readiness both for collaboration

this paper. MISQ Review articles survey, conceptualize, and synthesize prior MIS research and set directions for future research. For more details see http://www.misq.org/misreview/announce.html The associated web site for this paper is located at http://misq.org/misreview/teeni.shtml communication to a view that assesses the balance between medium and message form. There is also a need to look more closely at the process of communication in order to identify more precisely any potential areas of computer support

This paper includes a proposed model for cultural characters based on the PSI model of emotions combined with Hofstede’s cultural dimensions and the Big Five model of personality. It starts with an introduction to the research, followed by a discussion on the main features of PSI and Hofstede’s cultural model along with the Big Five personality parameters. Finally it discusses the integration of the three models.

The concept of affordance as it applies to user interface design is widely used and accepted; possibly overused. This paper explores one of the constraints on affordance: culture. Graduate and undergraduate students in the United Kingdom and the United States were surveyed and asked to make judgements about the behaviour of abstracted Western-like objects. The study clearly shows that UK subjects thought the down position of a light switch indicates it is “ON”; for their US counterparts it was “OFF. ” We suggest that context (in the case of this study, culture) is often overlooked, but is central to affordance, to computer interface design, as well as to action and activity more generally.

Some implications for firms and workers in developing countries

This paper proposes a review of the current Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) paradigm to include the effects of culture in international business. The authors aim to show through evidence and analysis of Chinese business practices that even Chinese culture nuances can be included in IMP models. Indeed the absorption of culture enhances the intersubjective certifiability of network theory.

This paper gives an account of themes that emerged from a preliminary analysis of a large corpus of electronic communications in an online, mediated course for intercultural learners. The goals were to test assumptions that electronic communication is internationally standardized, to identify any problematic aspects of such communications, and to construct a framework for the analysis of electronic communications using constructs from intercultural communications theory. We found that cyberspace itself has a culture(s), and is not culture-free. Cultural gaps can exist between individuals, as well as between individuals and the dominant cyberculture, increasing the chances of miscommunication. The lack of elements inherent in face-to-face communication further problematizes intercultural communications online by

People have long been able to carry out some forms of collaborative intellectual work over great distances. Messages and manuscripts have been exchanged by post for centuries, facilitating at least loose forms of collaboration. At the end of the 19 th century it became possible to conduct synchronous interactions over distance with the appearance of the telephone. Throughout the 20 th century a cornucopia of new communications technologies widened the options for interacting at a distance. Today we routinely use telephone, fax, e-mail, audio and videoconferences, instant messaging, and an everwidening array of collaborative technologies on the Internet to coordinate and carry out our intellectual collaborations and social interactions. Throughout history, however, face-to-face interactions have been highly valued. In ancient times, people would endure long, slow trips in order to conduct face-to-face discussions. Thus, the emergence of modern transport networks has also had substantial impact on collaboration. The railroad, the automobile, and the airplane have emerged as essential “collaboration technologies. ” Jet transport has been especially important. It is not uncommon to find that small talk among researchers ’ includes comparisons of their

Abstract. The increasing interest in personalizable applications for heterogeneous user populations has heightened the need for a more efficient acquisition of start-up information about the user. We argue that the user’s cultural background is suitable for predicting various adaptation preferences at once. With these as a basis, we can accelerate the initial acquisition process. The paper presents an approach to factoring culture into user models. We introduce the cultural user model ontology CUMO, describing how and to which extend it can accurately represent the user’s cultural background. Furthermore, we outline its use as a re-usable and shared knowledge base in a personalization process, before presenting a plan of our future work towards cultural personalization. 1

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.