One's colleagues can be situated in close physical proximity, yet seem quite distant. Conversely, one's colleagues can be quite far away in objective terms, yet seem quite close. In this paper, we explore this paradoxical phenomenon of feeling close to geographically distant colleagues and propose a model of perceived proximity (a dyadic and asymmetric construct which reflects one person's perception of how close or how far another person is). The model shows how communication and social identification processes, as well as certain individual and socio-organizational factors, affect feelings of proximity. The aim is to broaden organizational studies' theoretical understandings of proximity to include the subjective perception of it. By shifting the focus from objective to perceived proximity, we believe that scholars can resolve many conflicting findings regarding dispersed work. By understanding what leads to perceived proximity, we also believe that managers can achieve many of the benefits of co-location without actually having employees work in one place.

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and Rosemarie Ham Ziedonis, as well as seminar participants at Duke, Harvard, Maryland, Northwestern, NYU, and Wharton. We are especially grateful to Christine Oliver and the three anonymous reviewers for comments that greatly improved the paper, as well as Linda Johanson for her masterful copy editing We are indebted to Elaine Baskin, publisher of Communications Standards Review, for providing roster data from back issues in electronic form. We also appreciate the cooperation of Susan Hoyler and Eric Schimmel of the Telecommunications Industry Association. Science Quarterly, 46 (2001): 748-772 Technical Committee Activity the alliance formation literature is surprisingly silent on the systematic exploration of interorganizational mechanisms that might enable managers at this level to identify and assess alliance opportunities. Rather, the focus has been on top-level social networks, such as top team members' mobility or director interlocks, or on proxies such as technological similarity that can only suggest propensities for interaction. 748/AdministrativeOur study addresses these gaps by focusing on a domain in which actual interaction among lower-level managers may be observed. We focus on cellular firms' participation in industrywide technical committee activities, viewing the front-line managers as agents of interfirm collaboration. Technical committee activity is voluntary and non-contractual. Firms' participation in these activities generates interfirm ties with the potential for knowledge sharing. As such, this activity represents a pre-alliance network context, because interaction by technical professionals in these committees can generate the seeds of future alliances. We also explore conditions when this bottom-up type of alliance formation is likely to be amplified or diminished. COOPERATIVE TECHNICAL ORGANIZATIONS AND ALLIANCE FORMATIONInstitutions such as professional societies, trade associations, and standards bodies provide an essential coordination function for technological innovation, particularly for systemic technologies (Farrell and Saloner, 1988; Tushman and Rosenkopf, 1992; Garud and Kumaraswamy, 1995). The working groups, task forces, and technical committees formed by these institutions provide venues in which representatives of various firms and other constituencies share technical information, adjudicate technological differences, select standards, and negotiate future developments. We call these entities cooperative technical organizations (CTOs). A CTO is "a group that participates in technological information exchange, decision-making or standards-setting for a community" (Rosenkopf and Tushman, 1998: 31 5). In systemic industries, such as telecommunications, there are institutions with extensive histories and well-established structures. One prominent example is the large number of technical committees housed in the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), which was founded in 1865 and became a United Nations agency in 1947. The cooperative activity engendered by committees o...

An ethnographic study of a team of software developers working on a new product across two groups—located on the West Coast of the United States and in Bangalore, India—is used to analyze status dynamics in distributed groups. Whereas existing literature has emphasized the importance of communication, task design, and incentives for cooperation, this paper shows how status differentials and geographic distance reinforce each other to affect the work processes and collaboration in distributed teams. The focus is on two elements: the relationship between the collaboration across the two groups and their members and the members’ interpretations of this relationship. Status influences the perceptions of the remote group, as well as the willingness to cooperate with its members. The key findings specify the informal closure strategies used by the high-status group in relation to the low-status group. Furthermore, the superimposition of geographic and status distance in remote work lowered the cost of exclusion of one group from the collaboration and led to the deepening of status differences between remote groups. By showing status to be both an input and an output of intergroup relations, the paper specifies some of the mechanisms through which status orderings are maintained and reinforced.