A Culturally-Attuned Distributed Decision Making Model of Global Virtual Teams in World Summit on the Information Society

The purpose of this paper is to provide a rich description of people from diverse cultural backgrounds participating in distributed decision making process using email. The qualitative model was driven based on Adler´s (1997) culturally bound decision making model and Kingdon´s (1994) public policy making process. Our research question is ´how does the globally distributed decision making process different compared to Adler and Kingdon´s proposed theoretical frameworks? This study analyzed the archival email messages (n= 1760 emails) from Civil Society team members in the World Summit of Information Society (WSIS) over the period of six months. The findings help to explain the way people from diverse cultural backgrounds participate in a virtual environment that´s consistent with the sequential of Adler and Kingdon. In addition, our study also further exemplifies the dynamic and iterative process of distributed decision making among members of Civil Society.