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Excerpt from Sloan 2001: A Virtual Odyssey
This emergent process of change has been identified in the literature as an alternative to the more dominant model that portrays change as planned, episodic, and discontinuous (mintzberg, 1987; Weick and Quinn, It has also been used to characterize a series of ongoing and situated improvisations observed by Orlikowski (1996) in her study of organizational change enabled by the use of a groupware technology. We believe that the notions of emergence and situated improvisation can help us make sense not only of the changes we observed in the shift to an on-line application process but it can help us more generally make sense of the kinds of changes likely to be associated with shifts to virtual modes of organizing. Because the phenomenon of virtuality is so new and unprecedented, there is considerable ambiguity in what it means in practice to be working or operating virtually. Given this, we might expect organizations to experiment with and learn from a variety of virtual experiences. An analytic framework of emergence and improvisation would more easily account for such diversity and experimentation in practice than alternative models of change that rely more on assumptions of inertia, intentionality, and intervention (weick and Quinn.
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