Charles Steinfield

Recent team boundary spanning literature has recommended a shift toward assessing the role of virtual tools-such as social media. Simultaneously the proliferation of Enterprise Social Media (ESM) points to the need to theorize and investigate the supra-individual usage of these tools, such as their usefulness for organizational groups. This paper responds to both mandates through a theoretical integration of the team boundary spanning and existing ESM literature. Using data from two studies-one qualitative and one quantitative-this papers addresses two important research questions regarding the empirical relationship between team boundary spanning and ESM for understanding (i) the types of team boundary-spanning activities that group members enact through ESM and (ii) the effects of ESM on extra-team stakeholders' perceptions and reciprocating actions vis-à-vis the team boundary-spanning activities of these group members. The results of this study show that ESM, largely as a function of their visibility affordance, supports a narrow set of representational activities, but offers only limited support for information search and coordination. Furthermore, the findings reveal that ESM activity has a positive effect on extra-team stakeholders' recognition and financial support of the representational ESM posts emanating from the boundary-spanning group. Important implications for theory, strategy, and design are discussed.

Efforts to promote sustainable broadband Internet adoption urge new attention to the classic diffusion of innovations paradigm. For this study, innovation attributes were reconceptualized following Social Cognitive Theory (SCT). In a sample of inner-city residents, the model accounted for 36% of the variance in intentions to adopt broadband technology and services, primarily from the SCT variables of expected outcomes and self-efficacy. Prior habitual use of the Internet was also a predictor. Price sensitivity was ...

Effective workgroups engage in team boundary spanning, that is, using communication ties as conduits to critical external resources. The proliferation of enter- prise social media (ESM) and the associated increase in visibility of people, content, and interactions, has resulted in a widespread assumption that unlimited visibility improves boundary spanning. Consequently, the ESM literature has generally ignored the sentry functions of teams and failed to examine the possible strategic nature of visibility choices by ESM groups. Using log and content data from 655 ESM-based workgroups at a multinational enterprise, we contribute a deeper understanding of the distinct ways that ESM visibility—bounded or unbounded—is leveraged strategically to evoke diverse network structures, which in turn have implications for distinct boundary-spanning activities. Practically, these findings show that ESM present a unique opportunity for workgroups to simultaneously sustain multiple virtual spaces—with varying levels of visibility—through which they can manage their diverse boundary-spanning goals.

In this paper, we describe a collaborative system specifically designed to address problems faced by distributed (or virtual) teams. TeamSCOPE (Team Software for a Collaborative Project Environment) is a web-based work environment that has emerged from a research project studying the communication needs of internationally distributed engineering design teams. The paper begins by outlining some of the needs of virtual teams. An integrative framework that focuses on facilitation of group members' awareness of group activities, communications and resources is proposed. These needs and awareness requirements are then translated into a set of collaborative system design goals which have guided the implementation of TeamSCOPE. The features of TeamSCOPE are briefly reviewed, and some preliminary observations from early users are provided. We conclude by noting some of the new features planned for TeamSCOPE based on our early trials.

This study examines the relationships between information and communication technologies (ICT) usage, the benefits a company derives from membership in a rural business cluster, and the success of rural companies. Analysis of 333 rural businesses located in northern lower Michigan showed a strong relationship between (a) ICT adoption and benefits derived from the membership in business clusters, (b) ICT adoption and self-reported business success, and (c) benefits derived from business clusters and business success. Although analysis indicates that these relationships may be industry specific, results suggest that ICT adoption by rural enterprises may have advantages for the region’s social capital and
business success and may help reduce the digital divide experienced
in rural communities.

... CHYNG-YANG JANG , CHARLES STEINFIELD and BEN PFAFF. ... 9. STEINFIELD, C. HUYSMAN, M. DAVID, K. JANG, C. POOT, J. HUIS IN'T VELD, M. MULDER, I. GOODMAN, E. LLOYD, J. HINDS, T. ANDRIESSEN, E. JARVIS, K. VAN DER WERFF, K. CABRERA, A. 2001, New ...

ABSTRACT In this paper, we describe a collaborative system specifically designed to address problems faced by distributed (or virtual) teams. TeamSCOPE (Team Software for a Collaborative Project Environment) is a web-based work environment that has emerged from a research project studying the communication needs of internationally distributed engineering design teams. The paper begins by outlining some of the needs of virtual teams. An integrative framework that focuses on facilitation of group members' awareness of group activities, communications and resources is proposed. These needs and awareness requirements are then translated into a set of collaborative system design goals which have guided the implementation of TeamSCOPE. The features of TeamSCOPE are briefly reviewed, and some preliminary observations from early users are provided. We conclude by noting some of the new features planned for TeamSCOPE based on our early trials.

Abstract. This paper reports on an exploratory study of the evolving use of communication tools by six globally distributed teams. The analysis suggest that although teams have similar start-up conditions they evolve in different ways. We describe these differences as being ...

ABSTRACT One of the pillars of the Broadband Telecommunication Opportunities Program (BTOP) was expanding broadband utilization in underserved communities through the development of library-based public computing centers (PCCs) and educational outreach. This paper reports the results of two waves of surveys of 400 participants each in spring 2011, before the PCCs were implemented, and fall 2012, at the end of the program. The surveys were conducted in urban communities in Michigan served by libraries participating in a $6 million BTOP grant project to upgrade their public Internet resources. The surveys tracked perceptions of broadband services and their utilization in public libraries, residences, and other community locations. This study focuses on understanding how the utilization of library computers by community members impacted broadband adoption and utilization for upward mobility through education, work experience, and access to technology. Results indicated no changes between our two time-periods with respect to increased broadband awareness, home Internet access through either a computer or smartphone, or high speed home fixed-line broadband. Home fixed-line broadband access was more likely in households with higher incomes, a willingness to pay higher prices, and younger members than the rest of the sample.We discovered clear indications of who considered broadband access and library use the most beneficial. African-Americans and male participants were more likely to indicate an intention to adopt broadband as a means of starting a small business and doing work at home than white or female participants. Gender had no effect on taking courses online, but African-Americans were more likely than whites to see potential in taking online courses over broadband networks. We also found that older participants and participants from Wave 2 were less likely than younger and Wave 1 participants to show intention to take online courses. Further, race, income, and self-efficacy (i.e., belief in one’s ability to use the Internet successfully) interacted to influence the nature of broadband use. Participants who were young, African-Americans, high self-efficacy and low household incomes were more likely to look for employment outside their home city using broadband than participants who were older, white, high income and low self-efficacy. Young African-Americans with high self-efficacy were also more likely than white and low self-efficacy participants to state that the ability to take online courses was an important benefit of broadband Internet. Do library-based PCC facilities promote broadband utilization in urban settings? When controlling for age and point in time, library Internet use was more likely among African-Americans, low-income, and educated participants than white, high income, and less educated participants. PCC participants, defined as participants who reported using PCC facilities, were more likely to be younger, African-American, female, and have higher intentions to adopt broadband than non-PCC participants. Further, PCC participants were more likely than non-PCC participants to have intentions to use broadband to work at home and take courses online. Overall, 33.4% percent of the sample in Wave 2 reported using computers in their local library. Among these, 29.5% percent said they had noticed an improvement in PCC facilities.Our data suggest that, while broadband adoption intentions and home use of Internet connections were unaffected by the PCC intervention, there are ways in which other types of Internet resources are being accessed by marginalized people. Future policy considerations from these analyses suggest that library Internet services can benefit minority, low-income individuals who have also participated in more years of education, who have intentions to utilize these resources for online courses, business endeavors, and employment. We conclude, based on the above evidence, that library Internet access, use and further developments of resources like PCCs will be crucial for future digital literacy programs.

During the past decade, usage of online social network sites has grown dramatically, now exceeding search engines as the most visited Internet sites (Experian Hitwise, 2011). With the rise of such mega-sites as Facebook, which by itself now boasts more than 750 million active users around the world (Facebook Press Room, 2011), online social network site (SNS) use has become a fixture in the lives of a large proportion of the world's 2 billion Internet users (Internet World Stats, 2011).

Use of social network sites (SNSs) such as Facebook have been linked to increases in social capital, especially bridging social capital (Ellison et al., 2007; Steinfield et al., 2008). A growing body of work by the authors explores this question and related patterns of communicative behavior on Facebook. For instance, Lampe et al. (2006) argue that first‐year college undergraduates are more likely to use Facebook to search for people they know and Ellison et al. (2009) examine different “connection strategies” used by undergraduate Facebook users. In this chapter, we attempt to reconcile these two related strands of scholarship–social capital gains and interaction patterns–to forward a model of communication‐based social capital maintenance and generation on SNSs.

This paper overviews a Web-based collaborative system called TeamSCOPE that has been designed to support awareness needs of globally distributed teams. Four types of awareness needs of virtual teams are defined and the awareness support features of TeamSCOPE are described.The use of TeamSCOPE in a project involving a number of globally distributed engineering design teams is outlined, and evaluation results are provided. Findings illustrate how group process interacts with technology to create design challenges in the support of virtual team awareness needs.

This handbook is designed to provide tools for civil society institutions interested in developing and utilizing participatory videos as part of their toolkit. It is intended to serve as a practical guide for aiding organizations to conceptualize, produce, and screen participatory videos in community settings. Participatory video is a tool for positive social change, used across the globe as a means of empowering marginalized communities to take control of their destinies. This handbook outlines the Michigan State University approach to participatory video. Our approach differs from traditional participatory video methods in its emphasis on the use of video as a scalable teaching tool rather than advocacy. Our approach focuses on integrating farmers' stories in a narrative storytelling style in order to enhance the relevance of agricultural information for local communities.

Recent boundary spanning literature has recommended a shift toward assessing the role of virtual tools—such as social media. Simultaneously the proliferation of Enterprise Social Software (ESS) points to the need to theorize and investigate the supra-individual usage of these tools. This exploratory study responds to both mandates through a longitudinal, multi-method investigation of ESS’ effects on boundary spanning by virtual research teams within a worldwide provider of workplace solutions. Combining survey, ESS log, and content data, this study complements the dominant internal focus of the boundary spanning literature with an external stakeholder perspective to analyze the types of boundary spanning activities enacted through ESS, the perceptions of these activities by external parties, as well as the effect of ESS hereon. Disentangling ESS’ effects on boundary spanning not only extends our current understanding of the potential role of social media, but can further inform the design of supportive tools.

Given the large investments in Enterprise Social Media technologies in organizational settings, this paper sets out to explore the challenges and opportunities that ESM technologies provide for organizational communication. Merging existing conceptual work on ESM with findings from thirteen appreciative interviews with professionals from a large multinational organization, our papers offers six areas of opportunities and challenges-Social Capital Formation, Boundary Work, Attention Allocation, Social Analytics, Adoption and Use Incentives, and Governance and Control-that could guide researchers and practitioners in understanding and informing the use of social media technologies in their most productive and impactful ways.

With the ubiquity of data, new opportunities have emerged for the application of data science and machine learning approaches to help enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of knowledge management. With the growing use of social media technologies in enterprise settings, one specific area of knowledge management warranting the use of big data analytics involves cross-boundary knowledge creation and management. The objective of this paper is to develop and test a machine learning approach that can assist knowledge managers in detecting three types of intra-organizational boundary spanning activities with the goal of predicting and improving such important outcomes as team effectiveness, collaboration, knowledge sharing, and innovation.

In recent years, the ability to mine, manage, and examine big data has sparked a strong interest among scholars and managers to leverage data science approaches for measuring and in turn enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of various areas of knowledge management, such as boundary spanning. In this paper, we use a data science approach to delineate three distinct behavioral metrics of boundary spanning effectiveness and efficiency that are critical in determining the success of a boundary-spanning interaction-the dyadic relation between the boundary spanner and the responder, namely goal alignment, hierarchical alignment, and timeliness. These new metrics offer researchers and practitioners new means for assessing the actual rather than self-reported success of a boundary spanning activity as well as for evaluating the role of information systems in such boundary spanning interactions. Implications for research and practice are discussed. Introduction With the ubiquity of data, new opportunities have emerged for the application of data science and machine-learning approaches to help enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of knowledge management. The ability to mine, manage, and examine big data has sparked a strong interest among scholars and managers to leverage data science and machine-learning approaches for enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of various areas of knowledge management. The success of today's enterprises increasingly depends on the efficiency and quality of their cross-boundary knowledge flows and processes (Marrone, 2010). Various information systems, specifically emerging enterprise social media (ESM) technologies, are used to increase the transparency and openness of such cross-boundary knowledge flows with the aim of enhancing team effectiveness, collaboration, knowledge sharing, and innovation. Today, the growing adoption of ESM technologies in organizational contexts has profound implications for such boundary spanning knowledge flows in organizational teams. Social media encompass a range of information and communication tools (ICTs) for supporting interaction, collaboration, and co-creation, such as blogs, content communities, and social network sites (Leonardi, Huysman, and Steinfield, 2013; Treem and Leonardi, 2012). Studies of organizational social media use suggest that these systems have the potential to enhance cross-boundary knowledge flows-referred to as boundary spanning-by enabling the identification of and interaction with relevant external individuals and information (cf., DiMicco et al. 2008; 2009; Steinfield et al., 2009). Within the boundary spanning literature, recent papers have proposed the need for future research to move beyond traditional offline settings to study virtual contexts and in particular assess how the use of virtual tools, such as ESM, affects the success of boundary spanning activities (Kirkman & Mathieu, 2005). However, hitherto, the success of boundary spanning activities has solely been assessed by measuring the downstream impacts of these activities on other organizational performance metrics, e.g., team innovativeness or operational performance.

Boundary spanning has gained significant popularity in the field of information systems given its role as a critical antecedent to innovation and organizational performance. The majority of boundaryspanning studies have focused on assessing the impact of boundary spanning—as an activity—on distinct dependent variables, such as team innovativeness or operational performance, rather than on measuring the success of the boundary spanning efforts per se. In this conceptual paper, we integrate the literature on boundary spanning and usability to delineate three distinct dimensions of boundaryspanning success by measuring the effectiveness and efficiency of a boundary-spanning interaction— that is the dyadic relation between the boundary spanner and the responder. Our exploratory descriptive statistics reveal that although ESM may be useful in supporting teams in enacting effective information search in reaching the requisite target audience and yielding the desired resources, it is less useful for supporting effective representation and coordination. Developing success metrics not only helps us determine the role of IS in boundary spanning interactions, but also provides a behavioral approach to assessing whether or not boundary spanning is successful in itself rather than determining its downstream performance impacts.

For work teams to be effective, maintaining communication ties with other individuals and teams elsewhere in the organization-an activity typically referred to as team boundary spanning-is necessary for obtaining resources critical to project success. Within the literature on boundary spanning, the positive relationship between a team's boundary-spanning activities and their performance has been validated repeatedly, but primarily through the use of self-reports from managers and team members. Thus, neither objective data exists to support these claims nor a longitudinal understanding of how various boundary-spanning activities may play different roles at various stages of project work. Similarly, with the proliferating use of enterprise social media (ESM) technologies in organizations, the empirical link between the increased visibility of communication ties in ESM and more effective boundary spanning has been largely assumed, but has received only limited empirical validation. In this study, drawing on log and content data from 169 projects in an ESM of a large multinational corporation, we aim to objectively assess the effect of boundary spanning on project success as well as provide a qualitative path model of the evolution of boundary-spanning activities throughout the lifecycle of a project through a comparison of successful versus unsuccessful projects. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Effective work groups engage in team boundary spanning, that is, the use of communication ties as conduits to critical external resources. With the proliferation of social media technologies in enterprise settings and the associated increase in visibility of communication ties, understanding their impact on boundary spanning becomes imperative to improving cross-boundary knowledge creation and management inside organizations. In this paper, drawing on log data from 415 unique work groups in an enterprise social media (ESM) system, we use a machine learning approach to automatically detect three distinct team boundary-spanning activities. Using zero-inflated poisson regressions, we further show the effect of group visibility as well as three distinct sources of group structural diversity-geographic, functional, and hierarchical-on the extent to which teams engage in boundary spanning through ESM. Implications for theory and practice around the use of data science approaches as well as visibility and diversity constructs for understanding team boundary spanning are discussed.