ABSTRACT
Virtual work environments allow employees to work out of the office to be closer to clients who may not be located near the head office. Using detailed analyses of interviews from a real organisation, the book offers a new multidisciplinary approach for understanding how 21st-century employees make sense of a semi-dispersed (also known as ‘virtual’) organisational reality. The method, termed Discursive Sensemaking Analysis (DSA), is introduced. The chapter identifies three tendencies in the current organisational work environment: multiple team commitments, technology ubiquity and dispersion of organisations. The chapter also introduces the findings, which suggest that employees with professional identities, who may be marginalised in co-located organisational contexts, find a social basis for their identity in online, dispersed networks of employees with similar professional identities and approaches to organisational knowledge communication. Finally, the three Identity Prototypes identified at HR Consult are introduced, and their strengths and weaknesses outlined.
