ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the members of a start-up team deal with a particular conflict across time and media. It discusses a specific incident of conflict – a disagreement regarding the name for the prospective start-up. The start-up team constitutes a contemporary business setting without a formally assigned hierarchy or leadership roles. The chapter describes the emergence of conflict across a sequence of computer-mediated interactions on different channels from its beginning in an email exchange until its emergence and resolution in a Skype conversation. It explains the dynamically emergent character of conflict as “a process, not a state”. The chapter shows how the behaviour between the team members is influenced by their exchanges across different communication channels and what the members orient to as future communication, with special attention to disagreements. The location of the meeting – “at home in front of the computer” – constitutes a humorous reference to the virtual nature of the group’s communication.
