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Time & Society
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Invisible Social Infrastructures to Facilitate Time-pressed Distributed Organizing

Paul C. van Fenema

Rotterdam School of Management of Erasmus University, The Netherlands, p.fenema{at}rsm.nl

Christine Räisänen

Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden, christine.raisanen{at}chalmers.se

How do complex societal demands and time constraints posed by distributed temporary organizing affect organizational communication? Extending Bowker and Star’s (2002) work on infrastructures, we introduce two context-specific ‘invisible’, social infrastructures: organizational and relational. We empirically assess their role in an international, multi-site ERP-software implementation. We investigated how these infrastructures shaped organizational activities, aligned discourses, created order, and prevented divergent behaviours. We found that mutually interdependent organizational and relational infrastructures strengthened social relationships and saved time by facilitating non-routine collaboration and organizational communication under geographic and temporal constraints. We argue that the conceptualization of (infra)structural and process dynamics will help researchers and practitioners understand and handle organizational communication in distributed temporary organizations.

Key Words: distributed organization • infrastructures • organizational communication • time constraints • time-space

Time & Society, Vol. 14, No. 2-3, 341-360 (2005)
DOI: 10.1177/0961463X05055144
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