The last two decades have witnessed a significant dispersion of work across the globe, establishing globalization as an irreversible business trend. Overcoming the problems of distance, time and culture, modern firms today are relentlessly capitalizing on global work in their quest for attaining superior business value. Undoubtedly, as the business trends clearly suggest, globally distributed work has emerged as a business necessity for today’s firms. While the phenomenon of globally distributed work has been a subject of attention for both the scholars and the business community for some time now, there is much to be understood in terms of he phenomenon and its various nuances from a multi-dimensional perspective.

Globally Distributed Work (GDW) is an exciting emerging area of modern business practice addressing management of work distributed geographically across nations, economies, and cultures. The concept of GDW includes globally distributed knowledge work, including offshore and near-shore R&D and IT Services, global software development, business process and knowledge process outsourcing, and global supply and demand chains. It includes both outsourced work as well as work distributed to and conducted at MNC-owned or partnered companies and work-units at various sites around the globe.

As a concept-rich and potentially rewarding domain for empirical research and theory building, management of Globally Distributed Work is attracting increasing academic attention. However given the complexities of researching this topic, there is a need to bring together researchers and practitioners from diverse domains of interest to help develop frameworks for analysis, and document theories and practices that have the potential to advance the management of GDW.

Following on the first international conference that was held in Bangalore in December 2005, the Second International Conference on Management of Globally Distributed Work will provide an international forum for discussing various aspects related to GDW, and stimulate and bring together a multi-disciplinary community of researchers and practitioners (including a practitioners’ track and practitioner-led panel discussions) in the topic of GDW. In keeping with the theme of the conference, submissions and panels that link globally distributed work to business competitiveness – both positively and negatively - are particularly encouraged.  Broad topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Strategic and transformational drivers for global distribution of work

• Models and patterns for global work distribution and organization

• Governance structures for managing globally distributed work

• Coordination and control of globally distributed work

• Enabling processes, structures, and technologies for globally distributed work

• Knowledge transfer and sharing across GDW sites

• Knowledge creation and integration across globally distributed work sites

• Metrics for assessing the success of globally distributed work

• Role and importance of standardization in GDW

• Virtual and multi-cultural teams in globally distributed work sites

• ICT infrastructure support for globally distributed work

• Issue of cultural differences in global work

• Human resource management challenges in GDW

• Managing risk in globally distributed work

• Entrepreneurship and GDW

• Innovation and GDW

• Global innovation management

• The leader’s role in GDW

• Theoretical, ideological, and social perspectives on GDW

• Methodological perspectives to study of globally distributed work

• Regulatory and legal issues (including intellectual property related issues) in globally distributed work

• Impact of global work on local societies and economies

• Relationship between globally distributed work and geo-politics

• Corporate governance in globally distributed world

Papers and proposals for panels are invited on the above and related topics. Interested colleagues are encouraged to write to the conference program committee co-chairs, Deependra Moitra (deependra@moitra.com), Mary Teagarden (teagardenm@t-bird.edu) or Mary Ann Von Glinow (vonglino@fiu.edu) with their proposals and inquiries. The best conference papers will be considered for a leading journal’s special issue on Management of Globally Distributed Work.