Conclusions

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

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Orlikowski (1996) studied organizational transformation. The approach of this study is similar to her work that organizational transformation is "the ongoing practices of organizational actors, and emerges out of their (tacit and not so tacit) accommodations to and experiments with the everyday contingencies, breakdowns, exceptions, opportunities, and unintended consequences that they encounter" (Orlikowski, 1996, p. 65). The above statement is identical to the findings of this study in that users of the system continuously interact with the system through producing, reproducing, and transforming work practices (Giddens, 1984).

This study reorganizes the ontology and epistemology in virtual organization. Similar to Mowshowitz's (1997) depiction of a virtual organization as a computer with a communication tool or computer network that increases the efficiency and effectiveness of organization performance (Mowshowitz, 1994) and a social system, the findings of this study complement the virtual organization as a social system giving the new meanings of time and space. This study rethinks the philosophy of virtual organization, providing insight into the concept of duality of human identity. It is not only a lens for understanding virtual organizations, but also a socio-technical understanding of virtual organizations through structuration.

The basic purpose of this study is to initiate a theory-building process in the Internet area. An analytical view of modern science alone does not provide a complete explanation of what we investigate. As IT has developed so rapidly along with science, researches have become one-sided, lacking epistemology (Reichenbach, 1958). Authors intend to make progress in the epistemology of virtual organization with the help of continuous, logical induction of previous theories and current phenomena. The theories proposed in this study reflect the epistemological positions of virtual organization research. Thus, the authors hope it would be the basis of other empirical studies in the future.

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