Organisations are increasingly virtual in nature, less tied to place and time while being more temporal in existence. Project teams, cross-firm alliances, ad-hoc work groups are all part of the trend towards virtual organisations. Facilitating this transformation is a move towards short-term employment, outsourced non-core activities, telework and non-hierarchical structures. Such changes bring with them a great number of questions for society, as traditional patterns of employment and work give way to new approaches. This talk will attempt to raise some of these questions while providing few answers.

Charlie Bodwell is a research associate at the Judge Institute of Management Studies, University of Cambridge, UK and a visiting scholar at Stanford University, Palo Alto, California. He is currently working with a number of companies in California, Silicon Valley, looking into concurrent engineering and the organisation of product development through geographically dispersed teams. He has worked for seven years in the United Nations, serving in the executive office of UNIDO and managing projects in African, Europe and Asia. He has also worked for Schlumberger, General Motors, IBM and Agfa-Bayer. He has used studying to travel extensively, from Michigan State University to McGill University (Montreal, Canada) to ESASE (Barcelona, Spain) to Cambridge and Silicon Valley. He is currently lecturing on Team Building for the Helsinki Programme at the HELP Institute.