Implications

Chapter 15 - Virtual Organization: Duality of Human Identities in Consciousness and Entity
Managing IT in Government, Business & Communities
by Gerry Gingrich (ed)
Idea Group Publishing 2003

	Brought to you by Team-Fly

Barley and Tolbert (1997) defined an institution as "shared rules and typifications that identify categories of social actors and their appropriate activities or relationships" (p. 97). As they explained in their recursive model (institutions and actions), institutionalization involves the behavior of revision or replication of organizational abstracts (work procedures), and entails objectification and externalization of behaviors. In this sense, the successful functioning of a virtual organization is reaching institutionalization in virtual space. Through this process, the virtual organization becomes stable and helps serve as the constitution where human players can follow their activities. Upon further inference, institutions from business processes of real organizations constrain human actors (constitutive nature, r1) who in turn construct institutions of virtual organization (constituted role, v2), and/or vice versa (from v1 to r2).

The above arguments provide complementary insights to the social process explained by the structuration theory (Giddens, 1984). In this theory, actions and institutions continuously interact, thereby determining the structure. The structuration theory lacks the explanation of how these interactions (revising and reproducing an institution or structure) are processed, although this is arguable as Giddens explains the role of reflection, interaction etc. However, Barley and Tolbert (1997) clearly stated that their work, "the aim of institutional theory" is "to develop the implications of structuration theory for the interplay between actions and institutions and to address the practical problem of how to study institutional maintenance and change in organizations" (p. 112).

The authors believe that the results of this study are compatible with the belief of Barley and Tolbert (1997) that "the institutional perspective must come to grips with institutionalization as a process if it is to fulfill its promise in organization studies" (p. 112). The focus of this study is the explanation of what is going on at a virtual organization. The result revealed by this research is a rich description of theoretical induction. A limitation of this process is that it only reflects one part of the recursive model of institutional theory (Barley and Tolbert, 1997).

	Brought to you by Team-Fly