Introduction Virtuality and Virtualization Kevin Crowston 1 and Sandra Sieber 2 1 Syracuse University School of Information Studies Syracuse, NY 13244 USA crowston@syr.edu 2 IESE Business School Avda. Pearson 21, 08034 Barcelona, Spain sieber@iese.edu 1 Introduction In today's rapidly changing global work environment, all workers directly experience increased organizational complexity. Companies are functionally distributed, many across the globe. Intense competition for markets and margins makes adaptiveness and innovation imperative. Information and communication technologies (ICT) are pervasive and fundamental infrastructures, their use deeply integrated into work processes. Workers collaborate electronically with co-workers they may never meet face-to-face or with employees of other companies. New boundaries of time, space, business unit, culture, company partnerships, and software tools are driving the adoption of a variety of novel organizational forms. On a macro- level, these changes have started to reshape society, leading some to speak of the "Network Society" and the "Information Age." The word "virtual" has become a compelling catchphrase to describe these changes, but with different underlying meanings. "Virtual" is used to identify emergent work forms that differ from traditional work on dimensions such as the location of the workers, where and how work is done, how workers and teams or managers interact, and the relationships between partner organizations. "Virtual" can describe work environments where individuals are dispersed in time and space. Examples are individuals working at home (telecommuting), teams of employees from different organizations managing a supply chain or a shared project, or organizations that are established only for a certain time for a concrete purpose. Teams may disband when a project is over, and individuals may work on several teams at a time. Finally, these novel work arrangements may be called "virtual" because the work is done via ICT with simulated images and processes rather than exchanges of physical materials and performance of physical processes. While there is broad agreement about the nature of these changes, their scope and significance demands more in-depth research and debate. The increasing reliance on computer-mediated interaction has been heralded by some as the emergence of a new organizational form, while others have criticized this perspective as techno-utopian, pointing out that in fact, organizations and individuals often resist attempts to change, or change in unanticipated ways. The phenomenon of virtuality highlights Please use the following format when citing this chapter: Crowston, K., Sieber, S., 2007, in IFIP International Federation for Information Processing, Volume 236, Virtuality and Virtualization; eds. K. Crowston, Sieber, S., Wynn, E., (Boston: Springer), pp. 1-7.