ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the members of a start-up team deal with a particular conflict across time and media. The start-up team constitutes a contemporary business setting without a formally assigned hierarchy or leadership roles. As no member has formal decision-making authority over the others, leadership within the team has to be negotiated and disagreements are to be expected. The chapter examines a specific incident of conflict – a disagreement regarding the name for the prospective start-up. It tracks and captures the emergence of conflict across a sequence of computer-mediated interactions on different channels (email and Skype) from its beginning in an email exchange until its emergence and resolution in a Skype conversation. A relational continuity perspective (Sigman, 1991) is employed to show how the participants orient to past and future communication in their current interactions. This allows us to examine the contextual factors under which the conflict emerges.
