Virtual Reality

Conceptual Overview

Jaron Lanier coined the term virtual reality in the 1980s to refer to a computer-simulated space where people could interact with each other and with simulated objects. Throughout the 1990s, virtual reality was progressively broadened to include computermediated social interaction even in the absence of a simulated physical context. Virtual reality became a research topic for social science. Julian Dibbell's account of a virtual rape in a text-based online social simulation showed how these text-based virtual social settings were true microsocieties. She showed that in these online societies, social phenomena have a level of complexity similar to that of offline social experience. Sherry Turkle took the study of virtual social realities one step further by arguing that people's online experience shapes their offline identity. Online virtual social realities are spaces where people explore with aspects of their identity that are repressed in their everyday interaction. Virtual social realities also allow people to improvise ways of dealing with life changes that have a bearing on how they see themselves and that would entail a loss of face if carried out offline. Currently, authors such as Donna Haraway see themselves and other human beings as cyborgs—nodes in a network of human and nonhuman agents. They see no distinction between offline and online experiences—virtual reality is as real as everyday offline life.

Management practice and research with and around virtual reality lag behind these developments. Virtual reality in organizations is still mostly a label for simulated physical environments. Organizations use this type of virtual reality for training and for remote work. Pilots train in flight simulators and soldiers train in virtual reality combat games. Medical doctors can use virtual representations of patients to perform surgical procedures at a distance, and people whose work involves dangerous physical conditions can perform their tasks from a safe location using robots and virtual representations of the object of their work. Research on virtual reality in organizations has thus mainly addressed problems of human-computer interaction, [Page 1623]focusing on the use of virtual reality as a technology to help employees carry out their everyday work.

Recently, organizations have begun to use electronic mail and other forms of computer-mediated communication to create computer-mediated work teams. These teams, often called virtual teams, are described as much “thinner” social experiences when compared with virtual social realities outside organizations. Management research describes the communication content in virtual teams as comprising two elements: communication regarding the team's task and communication regarding the coordination of team members' efforts. Comparatively, there is very little, if anything, in the way of communication related to personal issues and to issues of identity. What is more, research on virtual teams has shown that identity challenges that need richer interaction to be addressed online are addressed offline in the virtual team member's local real-life context. Participation in virtual teams, as it is currently enacted in organizations, does not constitute a virtual social reality. In organizations, computers are mostly used as media to communicate and coordinate across different social settings. However, management research does catalog a few cases that, once subjected to systematic screening, may add to the uses of information technology in organizations. Employees in a small set of large organizations, including Ford and K-Mart, have used external computer-mediated communication systems to address threats to identity resulting from managers' policies. Reports of this practice suggest that employees use this type of communication technology to enact virtual social realities that are rich enough to shape employees' offline experience in organizations. Research on management has yet to analyze these occurrences, and thus, computer-mediated interaction is mostly studied to assess the efficiency and effectiveness of different managerial practices to coordinate work in virtual teams.

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