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Strategic Use of Virtual Organization
Abstract
In the modern business world, it is very common to use Internet technology to create e-businesses, implement e-commerce, etc. However, what is completely missing is the rethinking of the concepts of time and space in virtuality. What we are shaping in the Internet is essentially different from the conventional concepts of time and space after removing the constraints of time and space in business activities in the network. Without knowing this fact, all activities in virtual space will be redundant to what we have done in the real world, resulting in the Internet bubble economy. This paper introduces ‘desocialization’, a new premise of timelessness and spacelessness in virtual organization. Our efforts now focus on imposing the strategic use and adoption of virtual organization. We must clearly state that the foundation of this study is to emphasize the roles of human players in business organizations. Therefore, virtual organization in this study is best described as a socio-technical product of the social activities of human players. With this newly defined virtual organization, it is fairly simple to re-construct strategies to manage virtual organization. Most studies in strategy posit that the goal of strategy is to gain and sustain competitive advantages for a long haul (Ginsberg and Venkatraman, 1985). Accordingly, organizations with rare, valuable, and costly-to-imitate resources may enjoy a period of sustained competitive advantage in choosing and implementing their strategies and subsequently achieve extraordinary economic performance (c.f., Barney, 1997). Note that sustained competitive advantages denote something that cannot be displaced by strategic imitation by others or by substitutes. In this study, we introduce resource-based views to gain insight into the sustained competitive advantages in virtual organization. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to find the strategic use of virtual organizations in the context of the new premise, desocialization.
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