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