ADynamicAnalysisofDifferentCross-BoundaryBehaviorsEmergingfromSimilarOrganizations.docVIP

A Dynamic Analysis of Different Cross-Boundary Behaviors Emerging from Similar Organizations Laura J. Black MIT Sloan School of Management, E53-364, Cambridge, MA USA 02142. Phone 617-253-6638 Fax: 617-258-7579; lblack@. Paul R. Carlile MIT Sloan School of Management, E52-567, Cambridge, MA USA 02142. Phone 617-253-7782; Fax: 617-253-2660 carlile@. Nelson P. Repenning MIT Sloan School of Management, E53-339, Cambridge, MA USA 02142. Phone 617-258-6889; Fax: 617-258-7579; nelsonr@. Work reported here was supported by the MIT Center for Innovation in Product Development under NSF Cooperative Agreement Number EEC-9529140. For more information on the research program that generated this paper, visit /nelsonr/www/. Thanks to Deborah Ancona, Lotte Bailyn, Brad Morrison, JoAnne Yates, Wanda Orlikowski, and Jenny Rudolph for very helpful comments.  A Dynamic Analysis of Different Cross-Boundary Behaviors Emerging from Similar Organizations Abstract Organizations often look to technology to catalyze cross-boundary collaboration, and many new technologies are accompanied by claims that their use will increase collaboration in the organizations adopting them. Empirical research, however, documents that increased collaboration does not always follow the deployment of new technology, and in many cases a given technology improves collaboration in some organizations but not in others. The existing literature offers little formal theory to explain the paradox posed by similar technologies that often produce dissimilar outcomes. In this paper we offer a new approach for theorizing about the introduction of new “collaborative” technologies. We propose a “lens” that integrates three currently popular approaches to thinking about social phenomena: a focus on the activities that enact organizations, attention to accumulations of capital or “transformative capability” generated by those activities, and the use of simulation to explicitly capture the recursive relationship