Like all organizations jostling their way into a new environment, educational institutions find themselves performing multiple tasks that are measured by conflicting standards of effectiveness.
Electronic scholarship is no exception.
Using a competing values framework, this paper discusses standards of effectiveness for education and research in a global virtual context. The purpose is to illustrate the value choices embedded in decisions regarding electronic scholarship. Effective structuring of these exercises can be likened to walking a tightrope because different sets of values must be balanced. This question is explored by first describing a framework useful for assessing organizational performance. Then the four models of effectiveness comprising the framework, that is, human relations, open systems, internal processing, and rational goals, are used to guide our discussion of structuring global virtual collaborations.