From Virtual Organization to E-Business: Transformational Structuration

This article shows how the technical hype of 1990s has been transformed into the e-business organizations at the beginning of the 21st century. The authors took an interpretive stance in this study, grounded theory, and investigated the ontology of virtual organization by the metaphorical analysis. The metaphorical analysis adopted in this study provides the analytical power to conceptualize the social structure of virtual organization in the context of structuration theory with the process of grounded theory. As the e-business structuration indicates in this study, virtualization, the metaphor of virtual organization is interpreted as flexible domination, where the rational relationships in power distribution with other e-business characterized temporal (virtual) bond with low switching costs.