Organizing in cyberspace: The virtual link

This article presents and discusses some aspects of the impact of information technology (IT) upon organizational action. Its point of departure is to challenge the now emergent understanding of this subject according to which IT, while essentially considered from the vantage point of its instrumental value, induces radical changes in this area of human conduct. Consequently, it attempts to sustain the view that IT introduces an incremental process of transferring of current representations of organizing previously detained by human actors, to IT machines. This transposition does not annul human organizational enactment, but does not leave it untouched either. Rather, it opens and closes at one and the same time many different avenues in accordance with the simulative mode of IT operation. This mode will therefore constitute an important preoccupation in the present article. It will also be maintained that this transfer tends to alter the quality of what makes up an organizational relationship, so the article will also examine what constitutes this relation, i.e. the organizational link. In conclusion it will be suggested that IT, with regard to the human enactment of organizational representations, may develop to a point where it will substitute for the human modes of organizing rather than merely simulating them. At this point, organizational relations will acquire the virtual quality inherent to the locus of IT, i.e. to cyberspace.