Current research on collaboration has either focused on situations of face-to-face contact or on the behavioural antecedents of computer-mediated collaboration. Building on empirical data from virtual knowledge sharing and collaboration in the form of emails it is suggested to open the black box of cooperation by explicitly focusing on the communicative strategies employed by peers in their collaborative practices. A communicative perspective on knowledge sharing and collaboration first of all reveals that peers switched between intuitive and reflexive modes of collaborations whereas each mode is characterized by a distinct associated communicative strategy.

As the analysis shows reflexive modes of communication were triggered by a number of personal and situative moderates and were used to overcome problems of incoherence, situatedness and contested validity which occurred during the virtual collaboration episodes. Building on insights from the theory of communicative action as developed by Habermas the paper concludes by outlining a model which increases our understanding how problems in virtual, writing-based collaborations could be overcome in switching the modes of communication.

Daniel Geiger is a Professor for International Management at the Technical University Kaiserslautern (Germany).

His research interests culminate around organizational knowledge and change processes and he is particularly interested in linguistic and practices-based approaches for studying organizational processes. His research has been presented on all major national and international management conference and it is published in leading national and international journals such as Organization, Organization Studies, Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, and Management Learning.

He is member of the Editorial Board of Management Learning and serves as Reviewer for numerous international and national management journals.