Scenarios such as this one are not yet common in workplaces around the world. However, they are likely to grow in importance as 'synthetic worlds'-the term generally used to describe environments such as MPK20 (Castronova, 2005; Malady, 2006)-are developed and taken up in various contexts. In the consumer sector, participation in synthetic worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft is estimated in the tens of millions (Hof, 2006; Nardi and Harris, 2006), while synthetic worlds are also emerging as interesting sites of experimentation among scientists, educators and software teams (Bainbridge, 2007; Hut, 2008; Schultze et al., 2008). In organisations, a number of dedicated synthetic worlds-such as Project Wonderland (from Sun Microsystems), ProtoSphere (from ProtonMedia), Olive (from Forterra Systems) and Qwaq (from Qwaq)-are being deployed within organisations for the purposes of supporting distributed collaboration, project management and online learning and simulation. The use of synthetic worlds for organisational activities such as distributed collaboration raises interesting questions for scholars-how to make sense of and study these in management research? What are some existing perspectives that might usefully be drawn on to do so? What new or alternative perspectives might be more relevant? What are the implications of choosing certain perspectives over others in accounting for and articulating particular issues and insights? In what follows, I will draw on the scenario sketched above to explore the different ways that the management literature has addressed and accounted for technology over the years. This consideration will necessarily be both partial and broad: partial, because I examine only the main perspectives that have been developed over this period; and broad because I will focus on general characterisations of a wide range of studies conducted with different intentions, theories and methodologies. My interest here is not to offer a detailed review of various organisational accounts of technology, but to highlight distinctive positions and suggest some contrasts, problematics and opportunities. More specifically, I suggest that pursuing alternative perspectives on, and ontologies of, technology may be especially important and valuable for making sense of the sorts of virtual and distributed phenomena such as MPK20 that are likely to become a more significant part of contemporary organisational realities.Creative scientists may also be able to design experiments that are feasible in virtual worlds but were never possible before. For example, experiments can be done comparing the socioeconomic consequences of alternative government regulations, something next to impossible in society at large. Following this suggestion, organisational researchers could use synthetic worlds methodologically, as platforms for coordinating and conducting their inquiries into social behaviour. They are unlikely, however, to inquire into the specific technological entail- ments of synthetic worlds, how they are taken up and changed by participants or how they configure participants' interactions and with what outcomes. In the absent presence perspective thus, the role and influence of synthetic worlds for distributed collaboration- like technology more generally-will likely remain backstage concerns. 2.2 Exogenous force The second conceptual understanding of technology in management studies assumes that technology is an exogenous and relatively autonomous driver of organisational change and, as such, that it has significant and predictable impacts on various human and organisa- tional outcomes, such as governance structures, work routines, information flows, decision making, individual productivity and firm performance (e.g., Blau et al., 1976; Pfeffer and Leblebici 1977; Carter, 1984; Huber, 1990; Brynjolfsson and Hitt, 1996). This broad stream of management research developed in the late 1950s and 1960s with a number of studies of manufacturing technology and its relationship to forms of organising (Woodward, 1958; Harvey, 1968; Hickson, Pugh, and Pheysey, 1969). In these studies, technology was seen primarily as 'hardware'-discrete objects including equipment, machines and instruments-posited as distinct and separate from humans and organ- isations and hypothesised to directly impact human behaviour and organisational characteristics. Most scholars adopting an exogenous force perspective have followed the prescripts of a variance logic (Mohr, 1982), seeking to theorise the relationship between technology and organisation sufficiently generally so that predictions about technology effects may be made across types of organisations and technologies. This framing of technology as a material and causal determinant of organisational elements served as a key aspect of the influential stream of management research known as 'contingency theory' (Klein, 2006). Spanning the 1960s and 1970s, this stream of work generated considerable empirical research into the range of contingencies believed to influence technological impacts on organisations (Perrow, 1986). While acknowledgement of various contingencies has served to check excessive claims of technological determinism, a strong commitment to the powerful effects of technology on people and organisations has continued to inform this research tradition