Organizational arrangements such as telework are often believed to disrupt workers’ social networks. This raises a concern regarding teleworkers’ abilities to adjust to technological changes in organizations. Based on innovation diffusion theory, this chapter considers telework and interdependence as parallel dimensions of social proximity that may be expected to affect the diffusion of innovat...

Organizational arrangements such as telework are often believed to disrupt workers’ social networks. This raises a concern regarding teleworkers’ abilities to adjust to technological changes in organizations. Based on innovation diffusion theory, this chapter considers telework and interdependence as parallel dimensions of social proximity that may be expected to affect the diffusion of innovat...

In its on-going effort to define, specify and build a telework co-ordination system, the Telework Interest Group at FEUP DEEC has realised the need for a workflow management system that must be able to support business processes that rely on geographically distributed co-operative work. Telework is an innovative form of work organisation for decentralised or information-based organisational str...

Information and communication technologies (ICT) have had, and continue to have, a profound impact on the way work is organized, undertaken and managed by organizations and their employees. Telework, in particular, allows employees to work anywhere and anytime. These developments are not simply extending earlier temporal and spatial boundaries of work; they are profoundly changing the nature of...

INTRODUCTION Mobile work is not equivalent with telework, but the two share some characteristics. Our definition of mobile CSCW (Computer Supported Co-operative Work) includes (1) Individual workers move among several locations, as required by the objects of activity being to at least some part located outside of the computer; (2) People working together may be physically separated. Let us at s...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to serve as a reminder that all work arrangements, including the present case of distributed work, have their costs and benefits. Design/methodology/approach – In addition to a literature review, the paper presents concrete recommendations and guidelines for practicing managers about how to avoid pitfalls in distributed work arrangements and how to manage ...

Today, everyone recognizes that we live in the so-called knowledge society. In this society, new possibilities based on and around IT and the Internet arise for human beings. IT technology has also made the organizations where they work change rapidly as well as the wider general business environment. The development of the Internet in the early 1990s was both the catalyst and an example of thi...

Telework has been given more and more attention over recent years as a way to reduce urban pollution, as a new mode of work organization and oftentimes as well as a way of balancing work and family. Various authors have held different views on this issue, but a good number of North-American authors have centered their interest on how to make telecommuting function well within a firm, on managem...