Becoming the Corporate Native...Virtually: An Ethnography and Corporate Culture Assessment of a Virtual Organization
Year: 2012
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This dissertation presents an investigation of a rarely studied business entity in the cross disciplinary literature on organizational culture, a completely virtually organized firm. Subscribing to a conviction that any culture can only be understood through an approach that uncovers the lived experiences of its members, I employ the traditional anthropological method of participant observation as my foundational data gathering technique. In an effort to help engage anthropology with the cross disciplinary organizational culture literature generally, I also use two well-known methods of corporate culture assessment from the management sciences. I provide a number of recommendations to the sponsors of the research for addressing problems that relate directly to worker morale and performance and which, consequently, impact the company's overall potential for success. Some of these problems are unique to this particular company while other issues that I identify, such as weak organizational identification among employees, loose networks of social capital between co-workers, employee training and nurturing deficits, email overload impacts on employee productivity and regard for organizational leaders, and the encroachment of work on personal time, are problems likely to be encountered by members of other virtual work organizations. As such, my findings should be of interest to applied researchers who study these fast-growing types of work arrangements.
Author: Jennifer Laurel Avery
Institution: University of South Florida
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W19161683