Page 89 - WHERE WE WORK - Schlegelmilch

Reconfiguring workplaces
3.1 Introduction
Workplaces have long been crucial to the way we work (Davis, 1984; Elsbach & Pratt, 2007). However, work is expanding beyond the boundaries of a single location towards configurations of multiple locations, and the rise of distributed settings has challenged the role of single, co-located offices for some time (Watson‐Manheim et al., 2002). Digital technology enables workers to be remote from their colleagues, thereby increasing their level of autonomy and flexibility (Baruch, 2001; Gajendran & Harrison, 2007). More often than not, contemporary workers conduct work across multiple locations (Hislop & Axtell, 2009). For example, cafés and co-working spaces are part of the modern workers repertory of locations (Gandini, 2015; Kossek et al., 2015), who are sometimes even nomadic (Reichenberger, 2017). However, we still know very little about the implications of spatial settings for work relationships (Khazanchi et al., 2018; Rockmann & Pratt, 2015).
Despite these developments in where we work, the research on workplaces has focused on studying two primary areas: single locations, such as offices (e.g., Fayard & Weeks, 2006) or co-working spaces (Spinuzzi, 2012), and distributed settings (e.g., Hertel et al., 2005; Hinds & Kiesler, 2002). We argue that the contemporary worker is not confined to either setting and instead has a repertory of locations at hand that spans co- location and distributed work. With the proliferation of alternative locations and companies encouraging their employees to work there (Fullerton, 2013), current perspectives are not always reflective of how modern work is organized. Therefore, we propose to study workplaces not solely individually or distributed but rather from the standpoint of overarching workplace configurations, which refer to an individual worker’s arrangement of workplaces in a particular combination. For example, a workplace configuration may consist of a location at home and a corporate office.
Recent work has emphasized the increasing importance of relationships for work (Heaphy et al., 2018; Khazanchi et al., 2018) as today’s work becomes more interdependent (Barley & Kunda, 2001; Grant &
87