News

The pandemic has shown the world the benefits of working from home, including more flexible schedules and additional time with family. From this perspective, lack of communication when working from home might seem like a necessary side effect of these benefits. However, a recent study from Paul Leonardi (Department of Technology Management at UCSB) and Samantha Keppler (University of Michigan Stephen M. Ross School of Business) is showing that social media—widely available in remote work—can fill the role of, or even improve on, traditional types of communication. 

The Digital Mindset provides critical and actionable insights that make it possible for everyone—from the executive team to individual contributors—to help their company succeed in the digital era. Today's CEOs must make sure their entire workforce has a digital mindset. This book is the place to start. Jeff Henley, Executive Vice Chairman, Oracle The Digital Mindset. Harvard Business Review Press. ISBN: 978-1647820107 order at Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, and IndieBound.

Virtual communities of practice invoke novel forms of boundary work that are newly visible via publicly recorded discourse and failure narratives. This boundary work has critical implications for occupational knowledge, membership, and stratification. Building on social exchange theorization of network gatekeeping, the author tests the assumption that centralized peers are more competitive gatekeepers, in that they react more negatively to remedial narratives.

Check out Steve Barley's book! In recent years, a growing number of commentators have declared that we are at the beginning of a technical revolution that will see profound changes in the way we live and work. Yet what constitutes a technological revolution, and what logic supports how successive technological revolutions have unfolded in Western societies? How do technologies change organizations and what are the implications of intelligent technologies for work and employment?

In a virtual or hybrid scenario, how do we ensure that people working from home are not overlooked for promotion and selection for choice projects? How do we mitigate against “out of sight, out of mind? Worries that working remotely will hurt your chances of getting promoted are warranted. In one 2015 study that randomly assigned a group of workers at a large Chinese travel agency to work for nine months mostly at home or full-time at the office, the at-home workers were about half as likely as their office counterparts to get a promotion. 

Consider this paradox about digital change: Although it increases the need for collaboration in organizations, it also makes collaborating more difficult. In my research and consulting work, I’ve observed that this happens for three key reasons. First, it becomes harder to identify the right internal partners. In many organizations in the thick of transformation, particularly agile work environments, employees are given greater latitude to make important decisions on the ground.