Virtuality and Virtualization : Proceedings of the International Federation of Information Processing Working Groups 8.2 on Information Systems and Organizations and 9.5 on Virtuality and Society, July 29-31, 2007, Portland, Oregon, USA

In today's rapidly changing global work environment, all workers experience increased organizational complexity. Companies are functionally distributed, many across the globe. Intense competition for markets and margins makes adaptiveness and innovation imperative. Information and communication technologies are pervasive and fundamental infrastructures, their use deeply integrated into work processes. Workers collaborate electronically with co-workers or with employees of other companies. New boundaries of time, space, business unit, culture, company partnerships, and software tools are driving the adoption of novel organizational forms. On a macro level, these changes have started to reshape society.

This book considers possible frameworks for understanding virtuality and virtualization; ways of analyzing virtual work in terms of work processes; group processes within virtual teams; the role of knowledge in virtual settings and other implications of the role of fiction in structuring virtuality.

International Federation for Information Processing

The IFIP series publishes state-of-the-art results in the sciences and technologies of information and communication.  The scope of the series includes: foundations of computer science; software theory and practice; education; computer applications in technology; communication systems; systems modeling and optimization; information systems; computers and society; computer systems technology; security and protection in information processing systems; artificial intelligence; and human-computer interaction.  Proceedings and post-proceedings of referred international conferences in computer science and interdisciplinary fields are featured.  These results often precede journal publication and represent the most current research.  The principal aim of the IFIP series is to encourage education and the dissemination and exchange of information about all aspects of computing.

For more information about the 300 other books in the IFIP series, please visit www.springer.com.

For more information about IFIP, please visit www.ifip.org.