INNOVATING OR DOING AS TOLD? STATUS DIFFERENCES AND OVERLAPPING BOUNDARIES IN OFFSHORE COLLABORATION.

Author List: Levina, Natalia; Vaast, Emmanuelle;
MIS Quarterly, 2008, Volume 32, Issue 2, Page 307-332.
Increasingly, firms source more complex and strategic as well as harder to codify information technology projects to low-cost offshore locations. Completing such projects successfully requires close collaboration among all participants. Yet, achieving such collaboration is extremely difficult because of the complexity of the context: multiple and over-lapping boundaries associated with diverse organizational and national contexts separate the participants. These boundaries also lead to a pronounced imbalance of resources among onshore and offshore contributors giving rise to status differences and inhibiting collaboration. This research adopts a practice perspective to investigate how differences in country and organizational contexts give rise to boundaries and associated status differences in offshore application development projects and how these boundaries and status differences can be renegotiated in practice to establish effective collaboration. To illustrate and refine the theory, a qualitative case study of a large financial services firm, which sourced a variety of high-end IT work to its wholly owned subsidiaries ("captive centers") and to third party vendors in multiple global locations (in particular, to India and Russia), is presented. Using a grounded theory approach, the paper finds that differences in country contexts gave rise to a number of boundaries that inhibited collaboration effectiveness, while differences in organizational contexts were largely mediated through organizational practices that treated vendor centers and captive units similarly. It also shows that some key onshore managers were able to alleviate status differences and facilitate effective collaboration across diverse country contexts by drawing on their position and resources. Implications are drawn for the theory and practice of global software development and multiparty collaboration.
Keywords: boundaries; bourdieu; collaboration; cross-cultural teams; distributed teams; middle managers; outsourcing; power; practice theory; qualitative methods; status; virtual teams
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List of Topics

#28 0.218 cultural culture differences cross-cultural states united status national cultures japanese studies japan influence comparison versus china participants country singapore diverse
#237 0.183 boundary practices capacity new boundaries use practice absorptive organizational technology work field multiple study objects actors actor theory practical spanning
#149 0.106 offshore offshoring client projects locations organizational vendor extra cultural problems services home sites two-stage arrangements distributed multiple location experience outsourcing
#291 0.079 local global link complex view links particularly need thought number supports efforts difficult previously linked achieving simple poor individual rise
#77 0.063 information systems paper use design case important used context provide presented authors concepts order number various underlying implementation framework nature
#1 0.060 organizational organizations effectiveness factors managers model associated context characteristics variables paper relationships level attention environmental technological based maturity organization's relationship
#296 0.053 collaboration support collaborative facilitation gss process processes technology group organizations engineering groupware facilitators use work tool address practitioners focused develop