How Is Knowledge Created In Virtual Teams?

The book aims to explore the creation of knowledge in an emerging context, the context of virtual teams. Knowledge creation is conceptualized as a social process that involves situated activity mediated by language and technical tools. The framework suggests that the distantiation of time and space enables multiple voices to be brought into play within the various front and back regions of interaction. It is illustrated that the unique characteristics of the virtual context differentiate the process which is discursively constructed as team members depend solely on written and spoken language to construct the context of interaction, to negotiate meanings. The more diverse the characteristics of dispersed individuals,the greater the possibility of language misinterpretations and confusion, which in turn may lead to chaos or to development of new approaches to problems. These new approaches can be dynamic sources of new organizational knowledge. In the continuous effort of team members to understand themselves through others they are found to draw on voices of others (real and imaginal) and exercise greater control of the self they project in the various front and back regions.