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Reconfiguring workplaces
boundary of the corporate office for the better half of the decade. It was common to work flexibly at the office, at home, or at a client's office and TechSub provided the necessary technological infrastructure to do so seamlessly. Nevertheless, workers commented that when TechSub closed the shared office – despite available alternative workplaces – the relationships with coworkers were greatly impacted. We explored with our respondents how removing a shared office from the employee's workplace configuration shaped the employees’ work relationships. In doing so, we found that workplace configurations can be described along three dimensions, and that these dimensions differently affected relationships. We then turn to how the employees coped with the closure by defining new centers for their organizing. Lastly, we illustrate the limits of their coping efforts and draw conclusions. We support and illustrate our findings with quotes throughout the study and in Tables 3.5, 3.6 and 3.7.
3.5.1 Dimensions of workplace configurations
In our data, we identified three dimensions to describe workplace configurations: shared centrality, locational transparency and negotiated legitimacy. The first dimension is shared centrality, which we defined as the agreed-upon center(s) around which work is organized. For example, the presence of a shared office usually means that an employee works in a workplace configuration with high shared centrality. In the words of a respondent, “everyone is going there [the office]” (P02, employee, low tenure). The quote emphasizes the importance of the collective agreement on a center. TechSub’s closure of the shared office eliminated the agreed- upon hub from the employee's workplace configuration: “The building, it was the hub where I meet people. Rather than the office where I have my children’s pictures. That’s a big difference.” (P07, employee, low tenure).
The second dimension is locational transparency, which we defined as the availability of information about coworker’s whereabouts. During the closure, alternative workplaces were introduced and TechSub’s employees were encouraged to use them. However, it was often unclear where
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