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According to social constructivist theories of communication technology in organizations, work group members share identifiable patterns of meaning and action concerning communication technology. Empirical evidence of these patterns was found in a study of electronic mail use among a group of scientists and engineers. Social influences on technology-related attitudes and behavior were consistently stronger when individuals were highly attracted to their work groups. For individuals with low attraction, the specific patterns of influence were consistent with predictions from conformity research for compliance effects only; for those with high attraction, both compliance and internalization effects emerged. 921 Academy of Management Journal & Wajcman, 1985), social constructivist thinking about technologies has penetrated the organizational context. Weick (1990) drew on Law's (1987) study of Portuguese navigation in the 13th through 16th centuries to argue that technology emerges from relations among a heterogeneous set of elements. Weick's conceptualization of the sensemaking of communication technology as "equivoque" captures a core assumption underlying this new trend in communication technology studies: technologies are equivocal because they can be interpreted in multiple and perhaps conflicting ways. Technologies provide unusual problems in sensemaking because their processes are often poorly understood and because they are continuously redesigned and reinterpreted in the process of implementation and accommodation to specific social and organizational contexts. Communication technologies in particular link disparate entities in a seamless web that engages joint sensemaking in the process of mediated interaction. If communication technologies are indeed equivocal, what is the essential character of this equivocality, how does it arise, and how is it resolved, if at all, in the process of utilization? Trevino, Lengel, and Daft (1987) drew on structural symbolic interactionism (Stryker & Statham, 1985) to argue that technology users create rich meanings in mediated communication through their choices of media with specific symbolic features. In McLuhan's (1964) terms, the medium is the message. For example, the use of a formal, written medium symbolizes authority and can represent a dominance move on the part of the sender. Yet symbolic features need not be fixed attributes of a medium. The symbolic meanings may well arise, be sustained, and evolve through ongoing processes of joint sensemaking within social systems. In their "adaptive structuration" approach to communication technology, Poole and De-Sanctis (1990), drawing on Giddens (1979), highlighted the joint production and reproduction of structure and action in the process of interacting via communication technology. From their perspective, a constantly evolving set of social structures and technological manifestations arises as groups selectively appropriate features of both a technology and the broader social structure in which the group is embedded. A...

This article presents a model of how social influence processes affect individuals' attitudes toward communication media and media use behavior. The model integrates two areas of research. One body of work posits that media use patterns are the outcome of objectively rational choices. These choices involve evaluating communication options and selecting an appropriate medium to match the communication requirements of the task. The second perspective is social information processing theory (Salancik & Pfeffer, 1978). This approach proposes that attitudes and behaviors are partially determined by information embedded in the social context. The synthesis of these perspectives asserts that media characteristics and attitudes are in part socially constructed. Furthermore, attitudes are influenced by attributions based on observations of one's own past behavior. This model is shown to explain a wider range of existing empirical findings. Also, new propositions are derived to guide future research. This social construction model of media use has significant implications for the design, conduct, and reporting of future research in organizations.

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We introduce this Special Issue by providing an overview of the interplay between communication technology and various dimensions of new organizational forms. We consider the major factors motivating dramatic change within and between organizations today, and describe key dimensions of intraorganizational and interorganizational forms that are linked to electronic communication technologies: vertical control, horizontal coordination, size of organization and constituent units, new types of coupling, core product, communication cultures, ownership and control, interorganizational coupling, strategic alliances, and interstitial linking. Our purpose is to sample the changes attendant upon advances in electronic communication and organizational forms, with the goal of energizing future research. Our overview uncovers possibilities for new avenues of study within the technology-organization relationship and reveals the important contributions made by the articles in this Special Issue.

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This paper extends theories of public goods to interactive communication systems. Two key public communication goods are identified. Connectivity provides point-to-point communication, and communality links members through commonly held information, such as that often found in databases.These extensions are important, we argue, because communication public goods operate differently from traditional material public goods. These differences have important implications for costs, benefits, and the realization of a critical mass of users that is necessary for realization of the good. We also explore multifunctional goods that combine various features and hybrid goods that link private goods to public ones. We examine the applicability of two key assumptions of public goods theory to interactive communication systems. First, jointness of supply specifies that consumption of a public good does not diminish its availability to others. Second, impossibility of exclusion stipulates that all members of the public have access to the good. We conclude with suggestions for further theoretical development.Public goods theories grapple with the age-old problem of how to induce collaborative problem solving and other forms of collective action among self-interested individuals, groups, or organizations, assuming, of course, that they share at least some common goals. When successful, such collective action generates so-called public goods, such as parks, roads, libraries, neighborhood brush removal for fire prevention, beach cleanups, or other organized collective goals. Inducing collective action for interorganizational efforts is also a formidable challenge, applied in such diverse arenas as the United Nations, business cartels, conglomerations of charitable organizations, the Japanese keiretsu, and health service provider networks.Possibilities for collective action have expanded with recent advancements in information and communication technologies such as electronic mail, cellular telephones, and fax machines as well as the increased availability, complexity, and linkages of database systems, electronic bulletin boards, and other public and private information forums. These new capabilities can, in certain contexts and with appropriate inducements, support electronic communities such as the City of Santa Monica's Public 60

The present study examined how executives’perceptions of the environment affected their decisions to collect strategic information. It was hypothesized that two dimensions of perceived uncertainty would have unique relationships with environmental scanning. Interviews were conducted with 72 senior executives in a cross-section of industries and produced the following results: (1) strategic importance was the primary determinant of scanning; (2) scanning declined as the environment was perceived to be more complex; and (3)perceived variability interacted with importance to positively affect scanning.