Online Communication in Organizations Does Not Kill Distance: And Why That Might Be a Good Thing

Debates on the effects of online communication on distance within organizational networks have persisted within extant literature. Early contributions, which focus primarily on geographical distance, have highlighted the negative impact of distance on network evolution and sustenance, alluding to the importance of online communication as a means of nullifying these effects (Caimcross, 2001; Wellman, 2001). These studies have led to optimistic, but also premature, declarations of the ‘death of distance’ (Caimcross, 2001). More recent works however, have demonstrated that online networks are “to a significant part, digital reflections of pre-existing offline, local networks” (Hage & Noseleit, 2015, p. 4), emphasizing the relevance of distance to network formation. Not only do informal friendship networks have digital counterparts (Hage & Noseleit, 2015), the same can be said for other networks (Takhteyev, Gruzd & Wellman, 2012; Tranos & Nijkamp, 2013), especially that of organizational networks (Recker & Lekse, 2016).