Page 17 - WHERE WE WORK - Schlegelmilch
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Introduction
 digital age (Barley & Kunda, 2001; Colbert et al., 2016; Orlikowski, 2016).
Digital work – broadly defined as knowledge work enabled by digital technologies, such as remote work or distributed work (Colbert et al., 2016; Hinds & Kiesler, 2002; MacDuffie, 2007) – has become ubiquitous and imperative for most knowledge workers (Orlikowski, 2016). The dominant perspectives in practitioner and scholarly literature on digital work tends to focus on topics such as trust and control (Bailey & Kurland, 2002; Sewell & Taskin, 2015), technology use (Ciolfi & de Carvalho, 2014; Leonardi et al., 2010; Mazmanian et al., 2013), or conflict across distance (Hinds & Bailey, 2003). What receives less attention is the fact that all digital work is still conducted by workers within a physical environment, which can hinder or support the workers’ efforts (Brown & O’Hara, 2003; Irving et al., 2019). Thus, the underlying spatial configurations of digital work are being left in the background and workers’ experiences of them overlooked. I do not mean to say that the implications of the physical environment on work more broadly have gone unnoticed (Davis, 1984; Elsbach & Pratt, 2007; Weinfurtner & Seidl, 2019). Rather, I argue that studying the physical environment needs to be brought to how workers conduct work in the digital age and how the physical environment is consequential for individual and organizational outcomes (de Vaujany & Mitev, 2013), such as interaction, collaboration or innovative work behaviors (e.g., Bernstein & Turban, 2018; Kristensen, 2004; Moll & de Leede, 2016; Moultrie et al., 2007; Scott & Bruce, 1994).
It is also crucial for practitioners to better understand how workplaces are changing because workplaces have implications for how work is being conducted and “companies will [...] invest in improving them [workplaces] so employees can be more productive and happier at work” (Schawbel, 2015, p. 5). Less work is being conducted within the office as “the office is becoming more decentralized, and space [place] is shrinking. By 2020, the average amount of space [place] per employee will drop to 150 square feet, down from 400 in 1985“ (Schawbel, 2015, p. 4). While this suggests that this may decrease “the second largest financial overhead” (Davis et al., 2011, p. 192), it also raises the question in what types of places
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