Technologies are changing at a rapid pace and in unpredictable ways. The scale of their impact is also far-reaching. Technologies such as artificial intelligence, data analytics, robotics, digital platforms, social media, blockchain, and 3-D printing affect many parts of the organization simultaneously, enabling new interdependencies within and between units and with actors that many organizations have typically considered to be outside their boundaries. Consequently, today’s emerging technologies have the potential to fundamentally shape all aspects of organizing. This article introduces the special issue “Emerging Technologies and Organizing.” We treat these new technologies as “emerging” because their uses and effects are still varied and have yet to stabilize around a recognizable set of patterns and because the technologies themselves are, by design, always changing and adapting. To theorize the relationship between emerging technologies and organizing, we draw on relational thinking in philosophy and sociology to develop a relational perspective on emerging technologies. Our goal in doing so is to create a new way for organizational scholars to incorporate the ever-increasing role of technology in their theorizing of key organizational processes and phenomena. By developing a relational perspective that treats emerging technologies not as stable entities, but as a set of evolving relations, we provide a novel way for organizational scholars to account for the role of technology in their topics of interest. We sketch the outlines of this relational perspective on emerging technologies and discuss the implications it has for what organizational scholars study and how we study it.

How does cognitive diversity in a group affect its performance? Prior research suggests that group cognitive diversity poses a performance tradeoff: diverse groups excel at creativity and innovation but struggle to take coordinated action. Building on the insight that group cognition is not static but is instead dynamically and interactively produced, we introduce the construct of discursive diversity, a manifestation of group cognitive diversity, which reflects the degree to which the meanings conveyed by group members in a given set of interactions diverge from one another. We propose that high-performing teams are ones that have a collective capacity to modulate shared cognition to match changing task requirements: they exhibit higher discursive diversity when engaged in ideational tasks and lower discursive diversity when performing coordination tasks. We further argue that teams exhibiting congruent modulation---that is, those with low group-level variance in members' within-person semantic shifts to changing task requirements---are more likely to experience success than teams characterized by incongruent modulation. Using the tools of computational linguistics to derive a measure of discursive diversity and drawing on a novel longitudinal data set of intragroup electronic communications and performance outcomes for 117 remote software development teams on an online platform (www.gigster.com), we find support for our theory. Our findings suggest that the performance tradeoff of group cognitive diversity is not inescapable: groups can navigate it by aligning their levels of discursive diversity to match their task requirements and by having members stay aligned with one another as they make these adjustments.

Status–authority asymmetry in the workplace emerges when lower-status professionals are ascribed with the functional authority to oversee higher-status professionals and elicit compliance from them on specific processes or tasks. Eliciting such compliance is ridden with challenges. How and when can lower-status professionals with functional authority elicit compliance from higher-status professionals? To examine this question, I conducted a 24-month ethnography of 911 emergency coordination to understand how 911 dispatchers (lower-status professionals with functional authority) can elicit compliance from police officers (higher-status professionals). I identify a set of relational styles—entailing interactional practices and communication media—enacted by the dispatchers. My findings suggest that dispatchers whose relational styles involved customizing the workflow via private communications with police officers or privately escalating cases of officers’ noncompliance to supervisors did not elicit greater compliance. In contrast, dispatchers who did elicit compliance used a peer publicizing relational style: they shared news of the noncompliant behavior—generally in a bantering, humorous manner—with an officer’s immediate peers using a communication medium that all officers in the police unit could hear. Publicizing noncompliant behavior among the immediate peers triggered the officer to self-discipline, as that noncompliant officer’s trustworthiness was on the line in front of the peer group. More generally, through enrolling an alter’s peers in the compliance process, the lower-status professionals with functional authority could generate second-degree influence and elicit compliance from the higher-status professionals.