New Characteristics of Virtual Phenomena, Especially of Virtual Organizations

Virtuality is the property of computer system with the potential for enabling a virtual system (operating inside the computer) to become a real system by encouraging the real world to behave according to the template dictated by the virtual system. Virtual phenomena like virtual memory, network switching, virtual teams, virtual reality and virtual organization may change our way to work and perceive. Hence it is important to understand virtual phenomena, especially the virtual organization. In this paper we shall classify those virtual phenomena into some classes of dynamical systems. Our analysis will show that all the phenomena do not belong to one class only, but to the several classes. An outcome of our classification is that a certain class will give some new information about a particular virtual phenomenon; e.g. the virtual organization can be kept as a self-steering system where the same state never returns. Mowshowitz’ (1997) extreme definition of virtual organization played an important role as a motivator of our analysis. It, for example, raised a question: Does virtual organization have its own production/service or not? After showing that it had to have its own core competence, we succeeded also to find a new category of interdependency between co-operating organizational units. This new category, called parallel dependency, may have a lot of useful applications in the