Collaboration across Distributed Sites: Applying WorldSystems theory to Globally-Integrated Work.” Accepted by the Information Systems Workshop, Val d’Isere

The primary challenge of globally distributed work is minimizing the perceived social distance such that people at distributed sites who might never meet one another can work together in a collaborative way. This paper draws from World Systems Theory, originally developed by Immauel Wallerstein (1974), to examine how the model of core and periphery can be used to understand the structural impediments to developing these collaborative relationships. We use this framework to examine the distributed site relationships in an IT/IS company which we refer to as GLOBALIS. The paper demonstrates that national boundaries should not be considered as the primary unit of analysis. Rather, it is important to look at all of the distributed sites in relation to the central site, and how the arrangement of these locations within a global politico-organizational framework can inform our understanding of the social relationships that emerge in and through the work they do. By changing the unit of analysis from the specific sites to the entire system, the paper provides a new approach to examining globally-distributed collaborative work