Page 158 - WHERE WE WORK - Schlegelmilch

General discussion showcase the differences in affordances.
Taken together, this study indicates that what constitutes a workplace is less about what the place is intended for but instead how the place is perceived to be used (even temporarily). Furthermore, the study suggests that we need to treat the concept of the workplace more broadly by understanding and classifying the physical places along their affordances rather than their predetermined purpose as a place (not)to conduct work. Similarly, the findings in chapter 3 showed that what an individual or a collective workplace is, changes as employees collectively agreed to incorporate new places in their workplace configurations. An interesting endeavor for future research could be to study more in-depth how the workers’ perception of a place matches or contradicts the existing norms in the place, and how they deal with such tensions in their interaction with the environment. Alternatively, my studies also provide a fruitful starting point to examine how workers define, at a collective level, what an acceptable workplace is. And in terms of testing this quantitatively, researchers might explore which personality types are best suited for working in hyperspatial settings and whether there is a link between the ability to deal with uncertainty and productivity in hyperspatial settings.
5.1.2 Semispatial setting: Coordination of people and places is necessary
After studying hyperspatial settings of freelancers and entrepreneurs, in chapter 3, I turned to semispatial settings which represents many contemporary organizational workplaces. This chapter shed light on how work relationships are maintained across multiple locations. The workplace is rarely one single location but more often consists of multiple locations, or a workplace configuration. Through interviews, videos and documents, I identify three dimensions of workplace configurations: shared centrality, locational transparency and negotiated legitimacy. I showed that by removing the co-located office from employee’s workplace configurations, where they experience a change
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