Posted by administrator on behalf of Luis Martins
(
Luis.Martins@mgt.gatech.edu)
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Dear Colleagues:
NSF issued a revised solicitation on Virtual Organizations as
Sociotechnical Systems last week. Proposals are due 26 May.
Further information and a link to the solicitation itself can be found at:
http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2009/nsf09540/nsf09540.htm?org=NSF
This is a wonderful opportunity for US-based social scientists working
on topics pertinent to virtual organizations, broadly construed. A
synopsis and list of some potential topics is provided below. This
should not be construed as a complete list. Additional pertinent
research topics are welcome, so long as the work would yield sound,
generalizable advances in knowledge.
We look forward to receiving your strong proposals.
Feel free to distribute this notice widely.
Best regards.
Jack M.
Jacqueline R. Meszaros, Ph.D.
Program Director
Innovation and Organizational Sciences
Decision, Risk and Management Sciences
National Science Foundation
4201 Wilson Blvd., Suite 995
Arlington, Virginia 22230
Synopsis
A virtual organization is a group of individuals whose members and
resources may be dispersed geographically, but who function as a
coherent unit through the use of cyberinfrastructure. Virtual
organizations are increasingly central to the science and engineering
projects funded by the National Science Foundation. Focused investments
in sociotechnical analyses of virtual organizations are necessary to
harness their full potential and the promise they offer for discovery
and learning.
The Virtual Organizations as Sociotechnical Systems (VOSS) program
supports scientific research directed at advancing the understanding of
what constitutes effective virtual organizations and under what
conditions virtual organizations can enable and enhance scientific,
engineering, and education production and innovation. Levels of analysis
may include (but are not limited to) individuals, groups, organizations,
and institutional arrangements. Disciplinary perspectives may include
(but are not limited to) anthropology, complexity sciences, computer and
information sciences, decision and management sciences, economics,
engineering, organization theory, organizational behavior, social and
industrial psychology, public administration, and sociology. Research
methods may span a broad variety of qualitative and quantitative
methods, including (but not limited to): ethnographies, surveys,
simulation studies, experiments, comparative case studies, and network
analyses.
VOSS funded research must be grounded in theory and rooted in empirical
methods. It must produce broadly applicable and transferable results
that augment knowledge and practice of virtual organizations as a
modality. VOSS does not support proposals that aim to implement or
evaluate individual virtual organizations.
Critical challenges and prominent themes that scientific inquiries might
address under VOSS may include (but are not limited to):
* Units and frameworks of analysis-both social and technical: Social
units of analysis may be individuals, teams, scientific disciplines,
individual or multiple organizations. Technical units of analysis may
include specific tools or objects, virtual or immersive environments or
"worlds," specialized niches, or collections of such virtual
environments. What are the conceptual and comparative frameworks of
analyzing virtual organizations? What theoretical, methodological, and
empirical approaches can be applied, what need to be adapted, what need
to be developed?
* Organizational life cycles: What are the stages and causes of virtual
organization evolution, including, for example, formation of new
organizations, organizational change or transformation, and
organizational crisis or decline? How do they vary across task, domain,
population, and/or stage of organization lifecycle?
* Production and innovation: What technological, social, and legal
arrangements support intellectual production and innovation in virtual
organizations? How do these arrangements interact? How do they vary
across task, domain, population, and/or stage of organization lifecycle?
* Organizational structure, scope, and scaling: Are there levels of
connectivity, diversity, and interactivity at which scientific
production and innovation can be optimized in virtual organizations? How
does optimization on these dimensions vary across task, domain,
population, and/or stage of organization lifecycle?
* Individual and collective motivation: What are the social and
technological barriers to and/or enablers of participation in a virtual
organization? What are the social and technological forces of
coordination, competition, and/or collaboration? How do these forces
vary across task, domain, population, and/or stage of organization
lifecycle?
* Management, Governance, and Leadership: What are models of governance
agreement, and what should they address? How do they interact with the
cultures, structures and arrangements governing the participating
individuals and institutions? How do virtual organization and
participants understand, negotiate, and prioritize multiple and what
might be conflicting memberships?
* Measurement and assessment: What are the tests of efficiency, equity,
and effectiveness that can be applied to different types of virtual
organizations? How do these conditions vary across task, domain,
population, and/or stage of organization lifecycle?
* Comparative performance: Under what conditions do virtual
organizations outperform co-located organizations? What tasks or
processes can be done or done better by virtual organizations that
cannot be done or done as well in co-located organizations, and vice
versa? What are the advantages and disadvantages of
technological-mediation? Under what conditions (and how) might virtual
organizations be instrumented to advance our understanding of certain
phenomena better than co-located organizations?
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Fabio Fonti
Assistant Professor - Boston College
The W.E. Carroll School of Management - Organization Studies Dept.
432 Fulton Hall - 140 Commonwealth Ave. - Chestnut Hill, MA 02467
Phone: 617-552-6822 - Email:
fabio.fonti@bc.edu
Webpage:
http://www.organizationresearch.com/fonti/index.asp
'What's hard is to be as simple as Bach ... Making the simple
complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely
simple, that's creativity.'
Charlie Mingus
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