ABSTRACT
There has been a surge of interest among organizational scholars in the notions of boundaries and boundary-spanning. The term “boundaryspanning” is very broad and includes related phenomena of coordination and collaboration, which in turn can be cooperative or competitive in nature (Cohen, Cash, and Muller 2000). Boundary-spanning is certainly not new to social organizing (Merleau-Ponty and Edie 1964; Weber 1978), but recent advancements in information and communication technology (ICT) and globalization have enabled rich and inexpensive communication across a wide set of individuals and organizations and exacerbated the need for boundary-spanning work. For example, there has been an increased emphasis on boundary-spanning across diverse groups of experts as a key process in producing organizational innovation (Leonard and Swap 1999; Carlile 2002; Dougherty 1992; Hargadon and Sutton 1997). In addition, modern ways of organizing increasingly rely on spanning organizational boundaries in the context of strategic alliances (Gulati and Singh 1998), supply-chain integration efforts (Cousins et al. 2006), user-centered innovation initiatives (von Hippel 1988), and outsourcing of products and services (Levina 2005; Levina and Vaast 2005; 2008; Kellogg, Orlikowski, and Yates 2006). Increased globalization of organizations and markets has created a need for simultaneously spanning multiple cultural, institutional, temporal, and spatial boundaries (Hinds and Kiesler 1995; Levina and Vaast 2008; Espinosa, DeLone, and Lee 2007). Organizational initiatives such as “a single face to the customer” rely on the idea that through the use of ICTs organizations will be able to bridge boundaries across functionally diverse and geographically-distributed units and enable seamless integration of business processes. ICT is also enabling online production systems where users and producers of information goods collaborate on product designs (Lee and Cole 2003; Ciborra and Andreu 2001) and scientists can solve problems outside their domain of expertise (Jeppesen and Lakhani 2010).
