Managers are challenged to develop strategically flexible organizations in response to increasingly competitive marketplaces. Fortunately, a new generation of information and telecommunications technology provides the foundation for resilient new organizational forms that would have not been feasible only a decade ago. One of the most exciting of these new forms, the virtual team, will enable organizations to become more flexible by providing the impressive productivity of team-based designs in environments where teamwork would have once been impossible. Virtual teams, which are linked primarily through advanced computer and telecommunications technologies, provide a potent response to the challenges associated with today's downsized and lean organizations, and to the resulting geographical dispersion of essential employees. Virtual teams also address new workforce demographics, where the best employees may be located anywhere the world, and where workers demand increasing technological sophistication and personal flexibility. With virtual teams, organizations can build teams with optimum membership while retaining the advantages of flat organizational structure. Additionally, firms benefit from virtual teams through access to previously unavailable expertise, enhanced cross-functional interaction, and the use of systems that improve the quality of the virtual team's work.

This study directly tests the effect of personality and cognitive style on three measures of Internet use. The results support the use of personality-but not cognitive style-as an antecedent variable. After controlling for computer anxiety, selfefficacy, and gender, including the "Big Five" personality factors in the analysis significantly adds to the predictive capabilities of the dependent variables. Including cognitive style does not. The results are discussed in terms of the role of personality and cognitive style in models of technology adoption and use.

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This study utilizes an analysis technique commonly used in marketing, the conjoint analysis method, to examine the relative utilities of a set of beef steak characteristics considered by a national sample of 1,432 US consumers, as well as additional localized samples representing undergraduate students at a business college and in an animal science department. The analyses indicate that among all respondents, region of origin is by far the most important characteristic; this is followed by animal breed, traceability, animal feed, and beef quality. Alternatively, the cost of cut, farm ownership, the use (or nonuse) of growth promoters, and whether the product is guaranteed tender were the least important factors. Results for animal science undergraduates are similar to the aggregate results, except that these students emphasized beef quality at the expense of traceability and the nonuse of growth promoters. Business students also emphasized region of origin but then emphasized traceability and cost. The ideal steak for the national sample is from a locally produced, choice Angus fed a mixture of grain and grass that is traceable to the farm of origin. If the product was not produced locally, respondents indicated that their preferred production states are, in order from most to least preferred, Iowa, Texas, Nebraska, and Kansas.

Cities and space in the information age Telecommunications networks are an essential component of urban infrastructure in the 1990s, enabling the coordination of increasingly complex, multilocation, and timesensitive production systems as well as fractured social networks. However, despite the importance of this new information infrastructure to the economic and social prosperity of cities, relatively little effort has been devoted to systematic analysis of their structure, evolution, and future implications (Graham and Marvin, 1996).Two perspectives dominate the discussion on how recent advances in information and communications technologies will affect urban development. The first, the global city concept, originated with Hall's (1966) seminal work on the urban geography of thè`w orld cities''. In subsequent research, others have developed this concept within ongoing debates on globalization and economic restructuring (Friedmann and Wolff, 1982). A second perspective forecasts wholesale urban dissolution as a result of the conquest of spatial constraints achieved through cheap and ubiquitous telecommunications systems. In this section, I contrast these two perspectives and propose a new framework to address their shortcomings. As I will demonstrate in this paper, the rapid diffusion of advanced telecommunications systems like the Internet across a wide range of urban areas challenges this traditional dichotomy of centralization or decentralization, pointing to the existence of a complex new network of networked cities.