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T he increasing volume of e-mail and other technologically enabled communications are widely regarded as a growing source of stress in people's lives. Yet research also suggests that new media afford people additional flexibility and control by enabling them to communicate from anywhere at any time. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative data, this paper builds theory that unravels this apparent contradiction. As the literature would predict, we found that the more time people spent handling e-mail, the greater was their sense of being overloaded, and the more e-mail they processed, the greater their perceived ability to cope. Contrary to assumptions of prior studies, we found no evidence that time spent working mediates e-mail-related overload. Instead, e-mail's material properties entwined with social norms and interpretations in a way that led informants to single out e-mail as a cultural symbol of the overload they experience in their lives. Moreover, by serving as a symbol, e-mail distracted people from recognizing other sources of overload in their work lives. Our study deepens our understanding of the impact of communication technologies on people's lives and helps untangle those technologies' seemingly contradictory influences.

In this article we integrate three disparate views of culture and cultural change.With each view comes a distinct set of implications about the nature, scope, source(s), and consequences of culture change. Each view also suggests distinct implications for those who wish to manage cultural change in organizations. We argue that to understand how organizations change, in general, it is important to understand these disparate, yet interrelated processes of cultural change. We present these three views of culture and cultural change processes in organizations.

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