The Emergence of Virtual Groups

Abstract

This article describes how groups emerge out of collective activity and explains the institutional processes that lead to the development of group activity embedded within existing institutional settings. It describes the formation of virtual groups by using divergent social settings as examples (SOFTEK, a modern industrial corporation [Stephenson 1990], and the Namabeya, a nonindustrialized community) to emphasize the applicability of this model to a variety of contexts. Many of the views about group emergence, its role in organizational change and its impact on corporate and community life are derived from extant ethnographic descriptions of classical anthropological settings. In this regard, the seminal fieldwork of Gulliver (1963, 1971, 1977, 1979) among the Ndendeuli of Africa is used to illustrate the relevance and utility of the model. Additionally, I present the work of eighteen months of participant observation in a New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) high-technology firm to which I have given the pseudonym, SOFTEK. Behavioral studies typically recognize the importance of ad hoc formations within institutional settings (Mintzberg 1979, 1983). Of particular interest is the ad hoc corporate group. Adhocracy, a term coined by Bennis (1966) is an institutional structure that sustains the formation of corporate groups that are temporary by design. Such groups are highly suited for the performance of complex, innovative and uncertain tasks in turbulent environments (Galbraith 1971, 1974, 1977; Davis and Lawrence 1977, Kolodny 1981; Kanter 1983). I will illustrate how corporate groups coalesce around paradigmatic anomaly or cultural innovations. In so doing, these groups emerge and develop in an ad hoc manner and occasionally assume a life of their own?far exceeding the expectations of the individuals tangentially or centrally involved in the group. Paradoxically, the very presumption of perpetuity is antithetical to the ad hoc manner by which such groups initially emerge. In this sense, an ad hoc group may be considered virtually powerful because it is a dialectical reaction to generalized collective activity. This understanding of a virtual group is very different from traditional typologies of corporate groups (Smith 1974, 1978; Weber 1964, 1968; Mackenzie 1986; Mintzberg 1979,1983) and generic process studies (Moore 1975; Bourdieu 1977). Here, I develop and discuss a generative mechanism of how corporate groups evolve from collective activity. I focus on the institutional factors in the social organization of these groups as they materially bear upon group autonomy and are differentially invoked according to the specifics of situations. Incipient corporate groups are called virtual groups as they are mobile strategic positions within an existing institutional structure. As such,