Reading Corner

The Reading Corner

My research articles are shared and most downloaded from:

Academia.edu
Click here to go to my Academia.edu page.

ResearchGate
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Darl_Kolb/publications
For my publications, click here.

Other readings by theme:

Connectivity Conundrum (where more is less)

Marche, Stephen (2012). Is Facebook making us lonely? The Atlantic, 309(4), May, 60-69.

Digital Disruption

Extensive literature on disruption in human-computer interaction research compiled by corporate and academic scholars.

Disconnecting as a good thing

Mayer-Schonberger, Vicktor (2009). Delete: The virtue of forgetting in the digital age. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Hyper-connectivity's Impact on our Brains, our Work and our Lives

Atchley, Paul (2010). You can’t multitask, so stop trying. Harvard Business Review, December 21.    

Brockman, John (Ed) (2011). Is the Internet changing the way you think?: The Net's impact on our minds and future. New York: Harper Perennial.

Carr, Nicholas (2010). The shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember. London: Atlantic. 

Ekekwe, Ndubuisi (2012). Is your smartphone making you less productive? Harvard Business Review, April 6.

Goleman, Daniel (2013). Focus: The hidden driver of success.

Gregg, Melissa (2011). Work's intimacy. Cambridge: Polity Press.

MacCormick, Judith, Dery, Kristine and Kolb, Darl (2012). Engaged, or just connected? Smartphones and employee engagement. Organizational Dynamics, in press.

Rosen, Larry D. (2012). iDisorder: Understanding our obsession with technology and overcoming its hold on us. Palgrave Macmillan.  See Bryan Burrough's review in NY Times, 12 May 2012.

Turkle, Sherry (2011). Alone together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other. New York: Basic Books.

Gleick, James (2011). The information: A history, a theory, a flood. London: HarperCollins.

Hypo-connectivity's Impact on Health, Work and Well-being 

Brown, John Seely and Duguid, Paul (2000). The social life of information.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Publishing.

Hardy, Quentin (2012). 'A summer storm's disruption is felt in the technology cloud.' New York Times, 1 July.


Marche, Stephen (2012). Is Facebook making us lonely? The Atlantic, 309(4), May, 60-69.

Putnam, Robert (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon and Schuster.

On Networks

Stewart, James (2012). 'When network effects go into reverse.' New York Times, 17 August.  Video: Interview with Jim Stewart.

Optimal Connectivity

Harper, Richard (2010). Texture: Human expression in the age of communications overload. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Kolb, Darl, Collins, Paul and Lind, E. Allen (2008). 'Requisite connectivity: Finding flow in a not-so-flat world.' Organizational Dynamics, 37, 2, 181-189.

Johnson, Steven (2010). Where good ideas come from: A natural history of innovation.  London: Penguin.

Practical Philosophy and Advice for a Connected Age

Chatfield, Tom (2012). How to thrive in the digital age.  London: Macmillan.

Gordhamer, Soren (2013). Wisdom 2.0: The modern movement toward meaningful engagement in business and in life. New York: Harper.

Lanier, Jaron (2010). You are not a gadget: A manifesto. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Perlow, Leslie A. (2012). Sleeping with your smartphone: How to break the 24/7 habit and change the way you work. Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing.  See HBS blog: 'Breaking the Smartphone Addiction' (14 May 2012).

Powers, William (2010). Hamlet's BlackBerry: Building a good life in the digital age.   New York: Harper Perennial.

Rheingold, Howard (2012). Net Smart: How to thrive online. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Reports and Statistics

Cisco Connected World Report (2011). Reports views and attitudes of college students, who will become workers of the future.

Ganz, James (2012). 'The cloud factories: Power, pollution and the Internet' New York Times, 22 September.

Optus (Australia) 'Future of Work' Report (2011). Looks at trends in telecommunication, with an emphasis on mobile technology uptake.

Noonan, Mary and Glass, Jennifer (2012). The Hard Truth about Telecommuting. Monthly Labor Review, 135, 6.

Perlow, Leslie (2012). HBS blog: 'Breaking the Smartphone Addiction' (14 May), includes statistics of success of BCG consultants implementing 'Predictable Time Off' practices.

Rainie, Lee and Fox, Susannah (2012). 'Just in time information through mobile internet connections.' Pew Internet and American Life Project, 7 May.

Rainie, Lee and Wellman, Barry (2012). Networked: The new social operating system.  Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Scales, Measures and Empirical Work

Collins, Paul D.,  Kolb, D. G. (2012). ‘Innovation in distributed teams: The duality of connectivity norms and agency.‘ In: Clare Kelliher and Julia Richardson (ed.), New Ways of Organizing Work: Developments, Perspectives and Experiences, London: Routledge, 140-159. NB: Contains hypo-connectivity, hyper-connectivity, and connectivity choice (agency) scales.

Technical Connectivity

Connectivity Scorecard - A brilliant interactive on-line tool that shows the technical connectivity of many countries around the world.  Sponsored by Nokia Seimens.  A great in-class 'gee whiz' discussion starter.

Ganz, James (2012). 'The cloud factories: Power, pollution and the Internet' New York Times, 22 September.

Talbot, David (2005). 'The Internet is broken.' Technology Review, 108, 12, 62-69.

Connectivity gaps as distance in mobile environments. (blog regarding a talk at NJIT)

Social Connectivity

Myers, Michael and Sundaram, David (2012). 'Digital natives: Rise of the social networking generation.' University of Auckland Business Review, May.

Theoretical Models of Connectivity

Palfrey, J. and Gasser, U. (2012). Interop: The promise and perils of interconnected systems.  New York: Basic Books.

Mazmanian, Melissa, Orlikowski, Wanda, and Yates, JoAnne (2013). 'The autonomy paradox: The implications of mobile email devices for knowledge professionals.'  Organization Science (available on-line).

Kolb, Darl, Caza, Arran and Collins, Paul, (2012). ‘States of connectivity: New questions and new directions.’ Organization Studies, 33, 2, 267-273.

Kolb, Darl G. (2008). ‘Exploring the metaphor of connectivity: Attributes, dimensions and duality.’ Organization Studies, 29, 1, 127-144. 

Kolb, Darl, Collins, Paul and Lind, E. Allen (2008). 'Requisite connectivity: Finding flow in a not-so-flat world.' Organizational Dynamics, 37, 2, 181-189.

Theories of Networks

Granovetter, Mark (1973). 'The strength of weak ties.' American Journal of Sociology, 78, 6, 1360-1380.

Wellman, B. and Berkowitz, S. D. (1988). Social structures: A network approach. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Castells, Manual (1996, 2000). The rise of the network society. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Theories of Technology Use

Barley, Stephen R. (1986). Technology as an occasion for structuring: Evidence from observation of CT scanners and the social order of radiology departments. Administrative Science Quarterly, 31, 78-108.

Jones, Matthew R. and Karsten, Helena (2008). Giddens' structuration theory and information systems research. MIS Quarterly, 32, 1, 127-157.

Barley, Stephen R., Meyerson, Debra, Grodal, Stine (2011). Email as a source and symbol of stress. Organization Science, 4, July-August, 887-906.

Orlikowski, Wanda J. (1992). The duality of technology: Rethinking the concept of technology in organizations. Organization Science, 3/3, 398-427.

Orlikowski, Wanda J. (2007). Sociomaterial practices: Exploring technology at work. Organization Studies, 28, 9, 1435-1448.

Orlikowski, Wanda J. and Scott, Susan (2008). Sociomateriality: Challenging the separation of technology, work and organization. Academy of Management Annals, 2, 1, pp. 433-474.

Leonardi, Paul and Barley, Stephen R. (2010). What's under construction here?  Social action, sociomateriality, and power in the social constructivist studies of technology and organizing. Academy of Management Annals, 4, 1, 1-51.

Virtual (Distributed) Work

Duarte, Deborah and Snyder, Nancy Tennant (2006). Mastering virtual teams: Strategies, tools and techniques that succeed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Elliott, Anthony and Urry, John (2010). Mobile lives. New York: Routledge.

Lojeski, Karen Sobel and Reilly, Richard (2008). Uniting the virtual workforce: Transforming leadership and innovation in the globally integrated enterprise. Microsoft Executive Leadership Series. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Nemiro, Jill, Beyerlein, Michael, Bradley, Lori and Beyerlein, Susan (Eds). (2008). The handbook of high-performing virtual teams: A toolkit for collaborating across boundaries. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

'How to deal with conflict in virtual teams.'  HBR.

See Mark Mortensen and Michael O'Leary's HBR blog

Loneliness vs Solitude

Following last week's post about 'being alone together,' I ran across the May edition of The Atlantic; its cover story: 'Is Facebook making us lonely?'  Turns out, it isn't, but this is an interesting read about trends toward alienation, even as we are more connected. In sum, 'Loneliness is certainly not something that Facebook or Twitter or any of the lesser forms of social media is doing to us.  We are doing it to ourselves.  Casting technology as some vague, impersonal spirit of history forcing our action is a weak excuse.  We make decisions about about how we use our machines, not the other way around.' (p. 68)

What does it mean to be 'alone.'

In his New York Times Best Seller, Hamlet's BlackBerry, William Powers draws the distinction made by philosopher Paul Tillich between loneliness and solitude. Powers writes, "the word 'loneliness' exists to to express 'the pain of being alone,' while 'solitude' expresses 'the glory of being alone.' When we think of our greatest learning, our deepest connection with who we are, we recognize that along with elements of loneliness, we may have experienced the great 'glory' of solitude with our own self.  This reminds me of a dear friend and personal mentor, who kayaked from Washington state to Alaska alone, as he says, 'to find out if he liked the person he was traveling with.' 

The irony of new forms of self-expression is the constant tendency toward conformity.  Powers puts it well. 'Society is constantly throwing up obstacles (to solitude), telling us that we're worthless without the crowd, that everything is riding on its approval. In a country built on ideals of individual freedom and autonomy, one might think such messages wouldn't get much traction.  But freedom can be a heavy burden, and in a certain sense, the more we're responsible for managing our own destinies, the more appealing conformity becomes.' (p. 42)

I like Powers' book a lot and highly recommend it. In fact, it was the book I intended to write during my sabbatical. I proposed writing a 'practical philosophy for a connected world,' which is precisely what Hamlet's BlackBerry is.  I discovered his book about 3 months before leaving for Cambridge. Bummer!  But, better to find it before attempting to do a better job than he has done.  Besides, now I can spend more time on my blog. ;-)

For a great video on the subject of solitude vs being out there with the crowds, see Susan Cain's TED Talk on 'The Power of Introverts.'

'Connected, but alone?'

Sherry Turkle's recent TED Talk, entitled, 'Connected, but alone?' is well worth watching (and would add a point-scoring gee whiz factor to a class presentation).  Turkle has written several books on human-computer interaction, mostly of geeks (i.e., Life on the Screen).  She is generally neutral or upbeat about technology's role in society.  However, her latest book, Alone Together, is a somewhat frightening look at the state of human-computer relationships, wherein some of us expect more intimacy from our connective devices (screens) than we do from each other.  'Those little devices not only change what we do, but also who we are.' In her view, we are 'heading for trouble.'


In her TED talk, the M.I.T. professor suggests several drivers of the over-use of technologies (hyper-connectivity) that 'is taking us places that we don't want to go.'  First, she notes that many of us want to control the amount of attention we give to those around us, so that we can also give part of our attention to things and others elsewhere.  A room full of people texting or emailing is a situation of being 'alone together.' Second, she suggests that our near-constant media use reduces our ability to reflect upon--and therefore learn--from experience.  Third, in mediated space, we get to revise and 'clean up' our projected image to others, thereby avoiding the messiness of real-time conversation required for relationship building. Moreover, since conversations with others help develop our self-understanding, a loss of conversation brings the threat of alienation from others and ourselves.


Turkle identifies 3 myths of connectivity.


1. We can put our attention wherever we want to.
2. We will always be heard.
3. We never have to be alone.


She summarizes that, 'we slip into thinking that always being connected means we never have to be alone.' Ironically, even as the world becomes more and more inter-connected, each of us must still learn how to be alone in order to be capable of true, deep and meaningful human-to-human relationships.


FYA - I agree with Professor Turkle's assessment that gaining the 'attention' of others (often on-line), while avoiding the attention of others (often those in the same room) will be a challenge, not only for families, but also for organizations in the future.  Information is cheap, but attention is precious and fleeting.


Note: I recognize the irony in my new blog title.

Engaged, or just connected?

In his recent Harvard Business Review blog, Ndubuisi Ekekwe has taken up the discussion of when, where and how much connectivity makes sense in terms of productivity and personal well being.


As in any good debate, there is a natural, back-and-forth, on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand quality to the blog posts, i.e., we need to serve our customers in a globalized economy, but we also need to have a life.


Judi MacCormick, Kristine Dery and I have an article in press (see 'Engaged, or just connected?' forthcoming in Organization Dynamics) that identifies three types of smartphone user, namely 'hypo-connectors,' 'dynamic connectors,' and 'hyper-connectors.'


A typology of smartphone users provides a good starting point for understanding variations in smartphone (connectivity) behaviors.  Of course, we need to understand more about what makes one person a 'hypo-connector' and another person 'hyper-connector,' whether 'dynamic connectors' have better work-life balance, etc.?


Darl Kolb
Cambridge, UK


Key words: connectivity, HBR, Judith MacCormick, engaged or just connected

Economist warns of Hyper-connectivity

A recent column in the Economist (Schumpeter, 10 March 2012), entitled, 'Slaves to the smartphone: The horrors of hyperconnectivity--and how to restore a degree of freedom,' lists the advantages that smartphones have brought to working professionals, but also laments the problems that hyper-connectivity brings, as summarized in this quote:


"Hyperconnectivity exaggerates some of the most destabilising trends in the modern workplace: the decline of certainty (as organisations abandon bureaucracy in favour of adhocracy), the rise of global supply chains and the general cult of flexibility." 


The 'cult of flexibility' is a great term capturing the phenomena of employees who practice impression management by being the latest person to send emails at night and/or the attention-seeking manager who expects others to drop what their doing on short notice when they fire out an impromptu email.


The author suggests that individuals need to take responsibility for disconnecting (agency), but that resistance will be futile unless organizations also curb the cult of flexibility and unreasonable demands on our time.  


Darl Kolb

Blogging into the Darkness

Blogging into the Darkness

There is a New Yorker cartoon that shows a dog sitting at the family dinner table and the dog says, ‘I used to have a blog, but I think I’ll go back to barking randomly into the darkness.’

After a lot of consideration and the odd encouraging remark from my students and friends in the social media industry, I have decided to resume this blog. So here we go.

To avoid sounding like random barking into the darkness (if I wanted to do that, I would use Twitter), I have an idea of what I want to do here, which I will share with you, just so you know...

You see, the emerging field of connectivity studies in organizations only has a hand full of researchers and a few graduate students at the moment. It’s a pretty small field (or sub-field). And, this blog is aimed at those folks—most of whom I know, but others whom I look forward to meeting on-line or otherwise—who share an interest in the social and technical aspects of ‘connectivity.’

Definition:  I define ‘connectivity’ as ‘the mechanisms, processes, systems and relationships that link individuals and collectives (e.g. groups, organizations, cultures, societies) by facilitating material, informational and/or social exchange. It includes geo-physical (e.g. space, time and location), technological (e.g. information technologies and their applications) as well as social interactions and artefacts.’ (Kolb, 2008, p. 128)

The other user group for this blog is the growing number of MBA, graduate research and undergraduate students who have somewhat wisely and somewhat foolishly decided to write an essay on a topic like ‘contemporary media and its impact on work-life balance,’ or ‘smartphones as work-extending technologies’ or ‘productivity increases related to ubiquitous networks’ or ‘continuous computing: costs and benefits.’ And, now that you’ve chosen those inspiring, ambitious topics, you’ve realized that once you get past the popular media (which I am not knocking, it’s just that your fussy professors still insist on ‘academic sources’), there is virtually no general theory on the hyper-mediated world we live in.

A cup of theory

So, this is a place you can stop by for ‘a cup of theory’* when you need it. A few definitions and scholarly references will bolster your paper and hopefully give you a few new insights on such a cool and compelling topic. (By the way: Good choice!)

Posts will not normally be this long, I promise, but after 5+ years, a bit of catch-up is in order. First, it is fitting that I am re-launching this blog in Lyon, France. In 2001, fresh from my first sabbatical in Europe, I presented ‘A Research Agenda for Connectivity and Distance’ at the European Group for Organization Studies (EGOS) here in Lyon. I told my peers at the time that I would give this work 10 years and see how it goes. Well, 10 years on, I am still as psyched about the topic as ever, as connectivity is becoming increasingly critical to our day-to-day life. I am back in Lyon, on sabbatical again and looking out from our apartment looking across the Saone River toward the old town, on a beautiful spring day. It is a good place to re-start blogging, or to bark into the darkness.

Here is what I have done since the 2006 posting:

My colleagues and I have published 3 theory papers and a few empirical papers, with more under way. I will describe the theoretical papers briefly, with references and links to the full papers. You will note that the ideas contained in the papers were on-line in this blog before they were published, which is another good reason (besides desperation) to check this blog out from time to time.

The Metaphor of Connectivity

Kolb, D. G. (2008). ‘Exploring the metaphor of connectivity: Attributes, dimensions and duality.’ Organization Studies, 29, 1, 127-144.

This article articulates four (4) original reasons why the ‘metaphor’ of connectivity (defined by Agwin and Vaara and others in a previous Special Edition of the same journal) has relevance for organizations. Specifically, those attributes are:

‘Latent potentiality,’ meaning we use connections when we need them, but not all the time. We can draw upon networks, for example, when we want to have lunch or need a job. Networks may remain dormant for years, but are nonetheless potent when we need them.

‘Temporal intermittency’ means that connections come and go. Despite our sense of being ‘constantly connected,’ we are not. If nothing else, we humans and/or our friends and colleagues around the world have to sleep sometime. And, connections often fail. Cell coverage breaks up. Technology simply does not always work. In sum, there are inherent social and technical ‘gaps’ over time.

‘Actor agency’ means that when it comes to connectivity, we have choices. The debate around human ‘free will,’ which is called ‘agency’ in sociological terms, has gone on forever, and centers around the question of how much ‘structure’ (systems, norms, etc.) determines our behavior and how much we act on our own free will. If your cell phone rings, whether you feel social pressure to answer it (it could be your mother) or not answer it (you could be sitting in class) is a moment of connective choice.

‘Unknowable pervasiveness’ highlights the (sometimes scary) reality that we cannot know all the connections we have at any given point in time. In fact, the more connected we are, the more we are at risk. That is why cyber security and risk are becoming serious issues for individuals, organizations and nations. This is not to say ‘be afraid,’ but rather to remind us that increasing connectivity will lead to what Perrow calls ‘normal accidents.’

More importantly, theory-wise, this article borrows the notion of ‘duality’ from sociology and applies it to connectivity, wherein ‘connects’ and ‘disconnects’ are identified on multiple dimensions (technical, geo-spatial, interpersonal, group, organizational, networks, economic, cultural, political and philosophical). The duality concept is important because it says that, despite growing connectivity on all of these dimensions, there are enduring disconnects, which means connectivity is constantly in flux, i.e., in this ‘duality’ of connects and disconnects.

Requisite Connectivity

This is the concept I was writing about in my blog in 2006. I won’t say more about it now, but here is the published definition, with the full citation for the published paper below.

Definition:

‘Requisite connectivity is the state of having robust and reliable communication and/or transportation media/modes, with operable alternative work-around options, so that contact may be initiated or maintained at the rate, richness and intensity that we desire for a given task or social outcome.’ (Kolb, Collins and Lind, 2008, p.182).

Requisite connectivity underpins our empirical research, which I will describe later. I don't have to tell you that the concepts of ‘hypo-connectivity’ and ‘hyper-connectivity’ are showing up more and more in the media and I will certainly be discussing those issues more in the future.

Kolb, D. G., Collins, P. D. and Lind, E. A. (2008). ‘Requisite connectivity: Finding flow in a not-so-flat world.’ Organizational Dynamics, 37, 2, April-June, 181-189.

A very short, reasonably complete, and relatively recent summary of the state-of-the-art

If you want the most recent state-of-play of the connectivity field, see our recent Research Note in Organization Studies. It rectifies some confusion in the literature about ‘constant connectivity,’ but more importantly this article suggests that while asking questions about media choice--which is, of course, still relevant--the more important questions to ask are not ‘which’ media to use, but ‘how much’ connectivity do we need for a given purpose or task. If you are a research student, this is where to begin your quest.

Kolb, D. G., Caza, A. and Collins, P.D. (2012). ‘States of connectivity: New questions and new directions.’ Organization Studies, 33, 2, 267-273.

Have fun!

Darl Kolb

24 March 2012

Lyon, France

*My dear departed PhD supervisor at the ILR School at Cornell, Larry Williams, used to tell Craig Lundberg from the Hotel School to ‘stop by anytime for a cup of theory.’

Connects and Disconnects

Ok, so today is 5 years since my last post. Time to connect again. Watch this space. I will be back ..... soon.

Darl