The advent of portable computing and the Internet has rapidly opened up possibilities for a new mode of work: teleworking. This new workstyle is more flexible and dynamic than telecommuting, which has typically simply meant working from home. Under telework, employees are based wherever their work happens to be. But the growth of telework is a double-edged sword. The upside? Employees are able to work from their cars, hotels, or airplanes, and out of other firm’s offices, and from their homes, and on weekends and at night. The downside? Employees may be expected to work from their cars, hotels, or airplanes, and out of other firm’s offices, and from their homes, and on weekends and at nights. Telework presents challenges to both management and workers, and their relations with one another. After all, most corporate work cultures are designed to support face-to-face work activities at the office. And while some employees find the teleworking notion natural and attractive, others find the idea of working continually untethered and off-site disconcerting.Under the right circumstances, of course, telework can lead to that great desideratum: improved quality of life. And yet some employees will fret about the meaning of corporate membership if they have no physical corporate office they can call their own. Telework also terrifies some managers. After all, how do you motivate and supervise employees you rarely see?

anaging in the culture of telework requires executives and workers alike to cast off long-held beliefs and adopt new ones. For telework, by its nature, transforms the way a company lives and breathes. It alters the very genetic make-up of an organization. Rather than being stable and revolving around the workplace, telework is highly dynamic and centers around the work people do.

Wrenching a company around to accommodate telework is a process – more like turning around a battleship than clicking a mouse. It takes time. And throughout history, changes in corporate culture have rarely come easily or without pain.

Back in the 1760s, Josiah Wedgwood tried to bring the techniques of mass production to his pottery factory. But the local laborers, accustomed to working at their own rhythms, chafed at the new behavioral constraints. Mr. Wedgwood’s response would have made Chainsaw Al Dunlap proud. He imposed stiff fines for transgressions and created a supervisory career structure that rewarded those who followed the rules with easier work and higher pay. Eventually, Mr. Wedgwood attracted a work force willing to play by his rules. The new work culture was epitomized by the idea: “You are paid to do, not to think.”

Such managerial impositions curtailed human creativity. But they also harnessed machine productivity and forged a new industrial culture in the 19th century. Encouraged by productivity gains, the architects of industrialization continued to explore how a work logic based on ever more refined divisions of labor could further increase productivity. Eventually, much mass production work became completely meaningless to the workers and many viewed it as exploitative.

The mass-production culture bore fruit: think Henry Ford’s Model T. But it also wrought strikes, violence, and sabotage. The crisis it imposed ultimately shifted power from management to labor unions, and required managers to reconsider the meaning of work. In response, a new management culture slowly emerged based on the notion that more meaningful work experiences would improve work performance. This led to recommendations that increased worker participation and to extensive redesign of factories and offices.

The advent of information technologies in the late 20th century has set the stage for the next round of cultural change. In the past, managers and entrepreneurs sought to boost efficiency by manipulating structural designs – devising a better assembly line or installing air-conditioning. But telework technologies extend the human mind – they liberate rather than limit or constrain thoughts and ideas. As a result, the great workplace slogan of the 21st century may be: “You are paid both to think and to do.”

omputers – and the networks that link them – have changed the very locus and mode of work. The Internet allows people to be in constant contact with others who think in different ways. And as new information becomes available, they may think about work matters differently. Historically, the content of a work culture has been centered on specific tasks. In the wired economy, however, participants continually renegotiate and redefine the system of meaning – the very nature of work. As a result, telework tends to evolve and change quickly in unexpected ways.

Indeed, telework makes it more difficult to identify and define corporate cultures. Generally, organizations have relatively identifiable, stable cultures. The members share norms, beliefs, and behaviors that develop over time as a result of face-to-face interaction and shared experiences. In many instances, managers lay down the infrastructure of corporate culture.

When they introduce telework, managers must be aware of the way it can affect corporate culture. If the organization portrays the arrangements simply as a cost-reduction measure, the telecommuting assignments may involve routine work. Technology may be used simply to send and return assignments. Those who continue to work in the office are likely to feel they have a preferred status while those working outside are likely to feel they have been transformed into a source of cheap, out-sourced labor. If teleworkers view the firm’s actions as isolating, alienating, exploitative, and devoid of human sensitivity, an unhealthy culture will develop.

In contrast, if the organization makes telecommuting assignments with the intent of developing the firm’s human capital faster, telecommuters may be seen to be among the privileged elite. And as teleworkers anticipate and enjoy their relative independence and flexibility, they may feel empowered and develop unique cultures supportive of their work activities.

A teleworking company will differ, by its very nature, from a traditional organization company. Organization culture is built upon the ground of specified locations, determined tasks and bounded social units. Members build a shared identity based on daily personal contact. It is solid. You can see, touch, and feel it. As a result, it is more likely to produce an enduring organizational identity.

The telework culture, by contrast, is built upon the ground of individuals with computers working intensively on assigned tasks. It’s more amorphous. The values, norms, behaviors, and symbols that it forms around are associated with ongoing computer work performance.

In a teleworking culture, employees interact differently with one another. And that changes everything. Indeed, the use of e-mail – simple as it may sound – becomes an enormously important component of culture.

As any computer user knows, chatting by e-mail is far different than talking in person. E-mail is far more dynamic than real conversation. It requires high user involvement and interaction, but is also easy to use. It takes little effort to turn on a computer and send an e-mail – to one person or to forty – and there is no need to be physically and temporally co-located with others. Electronic and phone messages await teleworkers, which allows teleworkers to be truly distributed over time and space.

Teleworkers tend to rely on e-mail to communicate with one another. As a result, the overall emerging network content – the overarching conversation among employees – reflects a combination of individual user initiatives acting in conjunction with other interactions. A person might send an e-mail that contains a link to a website, or an attached file, or a photograph. A second person can pass the message – or part of it – along to one person, or to an entire group. In this way, the content of the conversation is continually being influenced but never controlled by individual teleworkers.

Teleworkers’ culture – their values, norms and beliefs – are continually emerging through a constant process of negotiation among the members of open and burgeoning e-mail networks. Telework culture is thus composed of the partial and temporary set of agreements members reach about a network’s current values, norms, and beliefs. It offers a common ground to foster interactions among the various team members involved in a particular project. By using e-mail, groups of workers can easily add members. This attribute generates an acceptance and expectation of fluid memberships.

orous boundaries are a corollary to fluid membership. Members can jump in and out of chatrooms after they have made their contributions. And at any point in time, teleworkers may in fact be members of several groups. A chief financial officer may simultaneously be teleworking with a company’s treasury staff on the budget and sitting in on a branding strategy meeting. Consequently, teleworkers’ experiences from one work group impact processes in other groups. The same individual may be running one task group and merely observing another. Best practices gleaned from one group may be tried out in another. And so the culture changes yet again.

E-mail also generates content in its very use. As teleworkers exchange messages, information about their interactions and relationship is recorded. And since these information threads are frequently accessible, the e-mail record becomes a trace of evolving understandings, with people applying their own perspectives and interpretations.

This mode of working can have its downsides. At some point, most networks need to develop ways to summarize, simplify, and clarify the understandings they have accumulated. This task becomes more difficult in a telework culture. And as the numbers of people involved in a conversation expands, the whole process can become overwhelming: a Tower of E-Babel. Norms of interaction, designed to maintain work focus and control, may overload. These norms may include rules for how and when to respond to e-mails, the topics that may be raised in a particular group, membership issues, or the use of signals to communicate message urgency. They may also include cultural understandings as to when to send an e-mail, or when to phone. Or when a face-to-face meeting might be in order.

ven as norms evolve, there is still no possibility that a stable cultural state will emerge. Consider what happens when a new member is added to an ongoing e-mail exchange network. The new member can get up to speed by examining the records and asking questions of clarification as needed. But once this happens, she will immediately begin to add her own perspective and insight to the conversation.

How do collective values shape these fluid processes? In traditional work groups, values – think quality, excellence, diversity – are often considered to be stable. But the members of a telework group are often not sure what is going to emerge from their efforts. So they only evolve to an understanding of what is not acceptable to the collective based on what is inviolate at an individual level.

This issue is apparent in the way Hatim Tyabji, the CEO of Verifone, Hewlett-Packard’s e-payment solutions unit, governed his virtual enterprise. In defining his organization culture, Mr. Tyabji suggested that Verifone would “create and lead the transaction automation industry worldwide,” and his firm would be close to customers and respond quickly to their needs.

To achieve these broad goals, Verifone mobilized many cross-functional teams, many of which had members in different locations relying on e-mail. While team tasks were defined, the methods by which they would achieve those tasks were usually left undefined. Members relied on each other’s ideas to determine what should be done. Teams posted both progress and problems on corporate networks. As situations arose, they sought help from across the company. Members of Verifone who had worked at other corporations were frequently astounded at the response speed created by these arrangements.

But the speed also generated tension and misunderstandings. And it quickly became apparent that face-to-face interactions were necessary to complement e-mail messages. As a result, one third of Verifone’s employees were always on the road having “off-line” meetings.

In traditional groups, individuals are likely to identify strongly with specific group values. In telework groups, where employees are likely to be members of more than one practice community at the same time, employees can shift their identification from one group to another depending upon the specific group that they are operating in at any particular time. So instead of regarding themselves as members of stable organizations, workers will see themselves as affiliates of several constantly evolving entities.

In the past, executives and experts viewed culture as stable content. But like evolution itself, telework culture is a process always in-the-making. Every day, individuals with different interpretive schemes show up for work – wherever that may be – and negotiate the meanings associated with the information they exchange.

And that’s not the only tension created by the growth of telework. In centered organizations, there is often widespread agreement about the norms of interaction. But as organizations grow more decentralized, interaction norms become subject to continuing negotiation, and conflicts between member beliefs, organization norms, and even its values may emerge.

Given such tensions, managers seeking to institute a new culture may face the same type of resistance that Mr. Wedgwood did back in the 1960s. But the modern-day process is likely to give rise to new challenges. Instead of inviting the crisis of alienation and meaninglessness that mass production brought, telework may spawn boundarylessness and burnout. In our 24x7 world, after all, distinctions between work and play inevitably blur. And that may yet prove to be the Internet’s great contribution to commercial culture.

Roger Dunbar is professor of management and organizational behavior at Stern. Raghu Garud is associate professor of management and organizational behavior at Stern.