Search results

To explain how genres structure temporal coordination in virtual teams over time.

The first year e‐mail archive of a small distributed software development start‐up was coded and analyzed and these primary data were complemented with interviews of the key participants and examination of notes from the weekly phone meetings.

In this paper, it is found that members of a small start‐up organization temporally coordinated their dispersed activities through everyday communicative practices, thus accomplishing both the distributed development of a software system and the creation of a robust virtual team. In particular, the LC members used three specific genres – status reports, bug/error notifications, and update notifications – and one genre system – phone meeting management – to coordinate their distributed software development over time.

The study confirms the various suggestions from prior virtual team research that structuring communication and work process is an important mechanism for the temporal coordination of dispersed activities. In particular, an attempt has been made to show that the notions of genre and genre system are particularly useful to make sense of and analyze how such structuring actually occurs over time.

In this paper, the research focus is shifted from how a given set of temporal coordination mechanisms affect team performance to how coordination mechanisms emerge, are stabilized, and adapted over time. It is also shown how the notion of genre may be used to shed light on the practices through which temporal coordination is accomplished in geographically distributed teams.

To provide ways of how organizations can benefit from entrainment, the purpose of this paper is to create a better theoretically grounded understanding of entrainment in organizations by reviewing the literature, describing managerial implications and identifying future research directions.

A systematic literature review of relevant literature based on peer-reviewed research papers published in highly ranked scientific journals.

It provides a clear understanding as to what constitutes entrainment in organizations and emphasizes its complexity. Further, six benefits of entrainment are highlighted, including the positive relationship between entrainment and organizational outcomes. The review may also provide entrepreneurs and practitioners a scientific basis for developing innovative tools to help managers’ foster entrainment in organizations.

The review indicates that entrainment plays a much larger role in organizations than we think. Change leaders' actions may impact the emotions and actions of change recipients through entrainment. The selected keywords used in the search and the researcher's bias of including or excluding articles for this review are the major research limitations.

It is one of the first papers, to our knowledge, to provide a structured overview and understanding of the entrainment phenomenon in an organizational context, based on 41 peer-reviewed articles.

The American Sociological Association Communication, Information Technology, and Media Sociology (CITAMS) section has long been concerned with the processes by which social connectedness and solidarity are created in a technology-rich, digitized society. In this chapter, the role of temporal symmetry in facilitating social synchronicity and digital connectedness is explored. Unity through simultaneity, which develops when spatially separated people focus on the same things at the same time, was conceptualized by sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel in a largely pre-digital age (1981) and coined as temporal symmetry. The concept has great relevance for the digital era and helps to explain why social media and digital technology have become so popular, consequential, and, indeed, indispensable in modern everyday life. The chapter explains how temporal symmetry is generated via digital technology in such activities as the viewing of live-streamed events, texting, and synchronous social media use. It examines how the temporal coordination of individuals’ streams of thought and internal rhythms can result in interpersonal similarity, like-mindedness, shared identities, and social synchronicity. Finally, it discusses the impact of these phenomena on digital connectedness, social life, and society in a digital age, contributing to the body of research CITAMS is committed to developing in helping the academy and the general public understand the impact of communication, information technology, and media on people’s techno-social lives.

Although slack resources and their relationship to performance have been widely studied in the literature, the temporal symmetry of this relationship, and the duration of its effects, are still unknown aspects and are the objective of this paper.

To evaluate this effect, an exploratory study has been designed on a sample of 449 Spanish industrial companies over a period of 12 years, assessing the impact of idle resources on economic and financial profitability. By means of hierarchical regressions, the short- term, medium- term and long-term effects of slack resources have been evaluated.

The results show that the impact on performance depends on the type of resource considered. Available slack has a consistent and positive effect on economic profitability in the short term. Other types of slack show persistent effects on performance, but, in the case of the recoverable slack, with a negative sign that contradicts the benefits provided by these resources. Finally, potential slack only has a permanent effect on financial profitability, but the sign changes depending on the economic context under consideration. There are also differences in the duration of the effects according to the type of resources.

This paper advances the knowledge about the slack-performance relationship over time that has been scarcely studied.

閒置資源與表現的關係從文獻中可見得到廣泛的研究。唯這關係的時間對稱性及其影響的持續期則是未知之數，這正是本研究的目的。

此為一探索性研究，以評估這影響。研究樣本為449 間西班牙工業公司，研究為期12年，目的為評估閒置資源對經濟和財務盈利能力的影響。研究使用層次回歸，評估了閒置資源的短期、中期及長期的影響。

研究結果顯示、閒置資源對表現的影響是視乎被考慮之資源所屬種類的。可用冗餘就短期而言，對經濟盈利能力產生一貫積極的影響。其它種類的閒置資源對表現有持續的影響。但可恢復的冗餘，則與這些資源會帶來好處的現象相矛盾，帶來負面跡象。最後、潛在的冗餘對財務盈利能力只產生持久的影響，唯有關的跡象則會視乎被考慮的經濟環境而改變。致於影響的持續期則會根據資源的種類而有所不同。

本研究使我們更了解冗餘與表現在時間推移上的關係，而探討這關係的研究是罕見的。﹞

We review literature linking patterns of vocal accommodation in the paraverbal range of the voice to small group structures of status and dominance. We provide a thorough overview of the current state of vocal accommodation research, tracing the development of the model from its early focus on patterns of mutual vocal adaptation, to the current focus on structural factors producing patterns of unequal accommodation between group members. We also highlight gaps in existing knowledge and opportunities to contribute to the development of vocal accommodation as an unobtrusive, nonconscious measure of small group hierarchies.

We trace the empirical development of vocal accommodation as a measure of status and power, and discuss connections between vocal accommodation and two prominent theoretical frameworks: communication accommodation theory (CAT) and expectation states theory. We also provide readers with a guide for collecting and analyzing vocal data and for calculating two related measures of vocal accommodation.

Across multiple studies, vocal accommodation significantly predicts observers’ perceptions regarding interactants engaged in debates and interviews. Studies have specifically linked vocal accommodation to perceptions of relative power or dominance, but have not shown a relationship between accommodation and perceptions of prestige.

Vocal accommodation measures have clear applications for measuring and modeling group dynamics. More work is needed to understand how accommodation functions in clearly-defined status situations, how the magnitude of status differences affects the degree of accommodation inequality, and how vocal accommodation is related to other correlates of social status, including openness to influence and contributions to group tasks.

The purpose of this paper is to identify, classify and analyse temporality in information systems development (ISD) literature.

The authors address the temporality and ISD research gap by using a framework – which classifies time into three categories: conceptions of time, mapping activities to time and actors relating to time. The authors conduct a systematic literature review which investigates time in ISD within the Senior Scholars' Basket, Information Technology & People (IT&P), and top two information systems conferences over the past 20 years. The search strategy resulted in 9,850 studies of which 47 were identified as primary papers.

The results reveal that ISD research is ill equipped for contemporary thinking around time. This systematic literature review (SLR) contributes to ISD by finding the following gaps in the literature: (1) clock time is dominant and all other types of time are under-researched; (2) contributions to mapping activities to time is lacking and existing studies focus on single ISD projects rather multiple complex ISD projects; (3) research on actors relating to time is lacking; (4) existing ISD studies which contribute to temporal characteristics are fragmented and lack integration with other categories of time and (5) ISD methodology papers lack contributions to temporal characteristics and fail to acknowledge and contribute to time as a multifaceted interrelated concept.

This work has developed the first SLR on temporality in ISD. This study provides a starting point for ISD researchers and ISD practitioners to test commonly held temporal assumptions of ISD researchers and practitioners.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate how biosociologists can further the understanding of Autism Spectrum Disorders by combining neurology's knowledge of the brain with social scientific knowledge about paraverbal communication and interactional synchrony.

Findings – We theoretically analyze Autism Spectrum Disorders through the lens of neurosociology and develop a research agenda centered on relationships among brain function, interactional symmetry, and autism. We also derive an intervention model involving the artificial manipulation of speech communication. In our analysis we draw attention to multidisciplinary research on vocal and behavioral synchrony and demonstrate how this knowledge contributes to a neurosociological understanding of autism.

Research limitations/implications – We synthesize diverse programs of research from multiple fields and innovate a neurosociological approach to understanding biosocial interaction rituals in relation to autism. We discuss the potential use of “dichotic filtration” of speech to enhance communication efficacy for individuals with autism.

Practical implications – Our arguments suggest that the social difficulties faced by individuals with autism may be rooted in problems associated with the cerebral processing of paralanguage. As a potential remedy for these problems, we suggest an intervention method based on recent technological advancements stemming from decades of theoretical and empirical research.

Social implications – To the extent that the proposed intervention model proves successful, it will enhance the lives of individuals with autism and those with whom they interact by improving social communication and associated channels for creating social bonds.

Originality/value – This work is uniquely important as an example of how biosociologists might move “from bench to application” in the context of a cumulative program of interdisciplinary research, development, and technology transfer.

This paper stimulates methodological debates and advances the research agenda for qualitative research about time and temporality in organizing processes. It develops a framework for studying the temporal in organizing that contributes by: (1) providing an overview to prepare for and navigate various methodological challenges in this regard, (2) offering inspiration for relevant solutions to those challenges and (3) posing timely questions to facilitate temporal reflexivity in scholarly work.

Based on a literature review of studies about temporality in organizing processes, the authors develop a framework of well-acknowledged methodological challenges, dilemmas and paradoxes, and pose timely questions with which to develop potential solutions for research about organization and time.

The framework of this study offers a synthesis of methodological challenges and potential solutions acknowledged in the organization studies literature. It consists of three interrelated dimensions of methodological challenges to studying temporality in organizing processes, namely: empirical, analytical and representational challenges. These manifests in six subcategories: empirical cases, empirical methods, analytical concepts, analytical processes and coding, representing researchers’ temporal embeddedness and representing multiple temporalities.

This paper allows scholars to undertake a more ambitious, collective methodological discussion and sets an agenda for studying the temporal in organizing. The framework developed stimulates researchers’ temporal reflexivity and inspires them to develop solutions to specific methodological challenges that may emerge in their study of the temporal in organizing.

The purpose of this paper is to synthesize, organize, and discuss multidisciplinary research influential to a service firm's use of a cyclical time‐based marketing approach that may be aptly termed time‐of‐day services marketing, to introduce a general process and framework to assist in the evaluation of its strategic use, and to present areas in need of future research.

Objectives are achieved via conceptual analysis and a synthesis and organization of the relevant multidisciplinary literature.

The paper finds that the principal benefits to service firms of adopting a time‐of‐day services approach in varying degrees are that it is able to assist the firm in offering multiple, unique value‐propositions, providing superior contextual value to the customer, enhancing customer perceptions of value in relation to their needs, and supporting the firm's pursuit of a sustainable competitive advantage in its services.

Time‐of‐day services marketing is a viable approach for some firms but is not a strategy to be pursued by all firms. Service industry executives and managers should carefully weigh its adoption in terms of an overarching framework to identify the best services strategy for their marketing and business objectives.

Time‐of‐day services marketing has received little strategic attention in the services marketing literature. Furthermore, there is no good, published source of guidance to help service industry executives and managers make decisions about the extent that such an approach may present opportunities for value creation and competitive advantage. This paper addresses these voids by providing and discussing a comprehensive set of multi‐disciplinary factors, process, and framework that facilitate its evaluation for strategic adoption. Theoretically, the research contributes to the body of services marketing knowledge by altering the services marketing view of the “day” to be one that can be increasingly examined as less‐constant in terms of many service‐relevant individual and social behaviors, more systematically varying, and increasingly explainable on biological/physiological, sociological and/or psychological bases which are ultimately highly relevant to services marketers

Recognising people by their gait is a biometric of increasing interest. Recently, analysis has progressed from evaluation by few techniques on small databases with encouraging results to large databases and still with encouraging results. The potential of gait as a biometric was encouraged by the considerable amount of evidence available, especially in biomechanics and literature. This potential motivated the development of new databases, new technique and more rigorous evaluation procedures. We adumbrate some of the new techniques we have developed and their evaluation to gain insight into the potential for gait as a biometric. In particular, we consider implications for the future. Our work, as with others, continues to provide encouraging results for gait as a biometric, let alone as a human identifier, with a special regard for recognition at a distance.