ABSTRACT
Together and separately, we have been studying geographically and globally distributed work teams for over a decade. Fortunately, our work (and the work of others) has evolved considerably over that time and we enthusiastically share in this chapter some of the methodological insights we have had and experimentation that we have tried along the Selecting the research team for these way. Our focus in this chapter is on qualitative field research in real organizations. We are not talking about studies using quantitative methods (which open up a whole different set of issues), nor about laboratory experiments or studies of student teams. All of those are valid methods (and between us, we’ve used them all), but we focus here on qualitative field studies designed to build theory about global work.
