Technology has been an important theme in the study of organizational form and function since the 1950s. However, organization science's interest in this relationship has declined significantly over the past 30 years, a period during which information technologies have become pervasive in organizations and brought about significant changes in them. Organizing no longer needs to take place around hierarchy and the collection, storage, and distribution of information as was the case with “command and control” bureaucracies in the past. The adoption of innovations in information technology (IT) and organizational practices since the 1990s now make it possible to organize around what can be done with information. These changes are not the result of information technologies per se, but of the combination of their features with organizational arrangements and practices that support their use. Yet concepts and theories of organizational form and function remain remarkably silent about these changes. Our analysis offers five affordances—visualizing entire work processes, real-time/flexible product and service innovation, virtual collaboration, mass collaboration, and simulation/synthetic reality—that can result from the intersection of technology and organizational features. We explore how these affordances can result in new forms of organizing. Examples from the articles in this special issue “Information Technology and Organizational Form and Function” are used to show the kinds of opportunities that are created in our understanding of organizations when the “black boxes” of technology and organization are simultaneously unpacked.

Information technology can facilitate the dissemination of knowledge across the organizationeven to the point of making virtual teams a viable alternative to face-to-face work. However, unless managed, the combination of information technology and virtual work may serve to change the distribution of different types of knowledge across individuals, teams, and the organization. Implications include the possibility that information technology plays the role of a jealous mistress when it comes to the development and ownership of valuable knowledge in organizations; that is. information technology may destabilize the relationship between organizations and their employees when it comes to the transfer of knowledge. The paper advances theory and informs practice by illustrating the dynamics of knowledge development and transfer in more and less virtual teams.

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Research on knowledge transfer in organizations has been hampered by the lack of tools yielding valid scores for studying critical constructs in concert. The authors developed survey measures of absorptive capacity (the ability to transform new knowledge into usable knowledge) and experienced community of practice (the extent to which a person is engaged with the given practice community) to provide tools appropriate for field research. A holdout sample of 1,971 engineers in a Fortune 100 science/technology company yielded 583 responses. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to assess internal structure, and convergent and discriminant evidence of validity. Path analysis was used to assess criterion-related validity. Results demonstrate that the new measures are internally consistent, are related in meaningful ways to other organizational variables, and provide distinct explanatory power. An additional 231 responses from a second Fortune 100 science/technology company provides cross-validation.

Special issues of scholarly journals have become more common during the last decade of management research. We review this trend and assess the effectiveness of special issues for knowledge dissemination. Methods include interviews with journal editors, compiling data on time to publication and on impact and quality of special issues for five mainstream management journals, and a case study chronicling the creation of the Organization Science special issue on “Knowledge, Knowing, and Organizations.” The findings show that journal special issue articles appear to be published more quickly than regular issue articles (time to publication), and for three of the five journals there is a significant difference in impact (measured as citation counts per article) when special and regular issue articles are compared. Further, we find evidence of greater variation in the quality of special issue articles compared to regular issue articles, although this reflects special issues publishing exceptional articles rather than the inclusion of substandard ones. The case analysis suggests that a series of preconferences on a common topic prior to a special issue did not appear to impact the type of papers submitted to or published in the special issue. We discuss the role of special issues and preconferences in knowledge development in organization science.