Exploring the Texture of Practices of Virtual Teamwork: The Line-of-sight of Work-place Communities

In this article, we report on our experiences of collaborating for seven years in an international virtual team of nine researchers, where a mix of digital technologies, were used for team collaboration. We explore the experiences of the team members as different digital technologies became entangled in the ‘texture of practice’ of our work community and tease out the implications for what this meant for us as team members. We offer two interconnected contributions. First, we show how adopting a relational perspective through the concept of texture of practices helps unpack the sociomaterial context in which virtual teamwork takes place, unveiling a complexity of different situated, individual and affective practices. Our research uncovers the micro-level practices that make team members visible to each other, thereby showing how different types of ‘visibility’ emerge relationally in practices rather than solely as an affordance of technology. Second, we show how this texture of practices renders team members visible to each other differently in time and in (the virtual) space, challenging the line-of-sight of the work-place community. Together, these contributions offer novel insight into the difficulties for the members of a work community to stay within the line-of-sight of each other when collaborating virtually.MAD-statement This article aims to Make A Difference (MAD) by exploring how a virtual work community unfolds with digital technologies. A study of the mobilization of multiple digital tools for collaboration and interaction amongst the members of a virtual team highlights how the humans and technologies of the team became connected in a complex ‘texture of practices’. When considering new technologies for collaboration in a work community, this needs to be considered to not disturb the work community’s ‘line-of-sight’.