Research Coordination Network on Leveraging Computational Social Science for Understanding Virtual Organizations

Rapid advances in digitally-enabled communications have given rise to a new organizational form – the virtual organization. Because of their immense capacity for flexibility and their ability to draw on diverse expertise across time and space, the large-scale, cross-boundary collaborations enabled by virtual organizations have the potential to solve some of the grand challenges of today’s world – those in environmental sustainability, climate change, disaster response, education, and health care. However, research on understanding and enabling virtual organizations requires the deep expertise of many disciplines including computer science, information and decision sciences, communication, management, and psychology, to name a few. Therefore an integral next step is to invest in community and infrastructure development that better fuses the “social” and the “technical” cores of this research enterprise. This need for greater socio-technical integration is at the heart of a new paradigm which we call computational social science enabled virtual organizational research (CSSeVOR).

This research coordination network increased the interconnections between scholars across disciplines and catalyzed a new community examining virtual organizations using computational and data-enabled approaches. Big data presents an enormous opportunity for organizational science, particularly the areas aimed at understanding human behavior and organizing processes. However, utilizing such data requires a fundamental transformation within the areas of science engaged in this problem domain. This project engaged a core set of interdisciplinary scientists representing both the “social” and the “technical” thinking about virtual organizing, to work collaboratively to build the scientific network needed to tackle the challenges of utilizing big data in the organizational sciences, and to set up the necessary conditions for big-data enabled organizational science research to thrive. The project team conducted workshops, research incubators, doctoral consortia, and a conference (IC2S2) to build community and capacity for computational virtual organization research.