Knowledge Integration Through Inter-Organizational Virtual Organizations

Virtual Organization

Since the concept of virtual organization was introduced by Mowshowitz (1986) and popularized by Davidow and Malone (1992), it has become increasingly used in management theory and, in particular, in the information systems literature. An initial approach to this term suggests that a virtual organization is a geographically distributed organization whose members are bound by a long-term common interest, and who communicate and coordinate their work through information technologies (Ahuja and Carley, 1999). Computers and information technologies favour the linking of corporate processes (Davidow and Malone, 1992) and the shift towards virtual organizations entails fundamental changes in managing daily operations and coordination tasks.

According to some authors (e.g. Kasper-Fuehrer and Ashkanasy, 2003), there are two approaches to studying virtual organizations, depending on the unit of analysis: the intra-organizational view, in which virtual organization is a collaboration of business units within an organization, or the inter-organizational view, in which different organizations collaborate to form a cooperative agreement. We focus on the second approach since our interest lies in the integration of knowledge through various firms.