Page 164 - WHERE WE WORK - Schlegelmilch

General discussion
a valuable endeavor to a spatiality lens because place matters for how people conduct work. With this, I follow other management and organizational scholars (Ayoko & Ashkanasy, 2020; Davis et al., 2011; Elsbach & Pratt, 2007; Weinfurtner & Seidl, 2019), who argued that place and its role for work should be studied explicitly rather than implicitly, which is in line with the ‘spatial turn’ in organization studies (de Vaujany & Mitev, 2013; Van Marrewijk & Yanow, 2017; Weinfurtner & Seidl, 2019). For further research, I encourage scholars to employ the lens of spatiality in their studies of digital work. In particular, as the COVID-19 pandemic has shifted our perspective from remote work as a choice towards remote work as a default (Bernstein et al., 2020), the physical settings of work are changing for a wider range of white-collar workers. This provides an interesting avenue of research to study how the physical and the digital environment intertwine while working (Colbert et al., 2016).
5.2.2 The power of focusing on actions to define a workplace
Scholars may learn from this dissertation that a workplace can be defined by the actions taken there rather than a location’s predetermined purpose. In different chapters of this dissertation, I showed that focusing on the activities conducted in a place helps us to better understand how workers perceive a place and what a workplace is for digital workers. In the study presented in chapter 2, I focused specifically on how workers interact with their physical environment to create temporary workplaces in a multitude of locations. By foregrounding the worker’s interaction with (and thus actions in) the environment, I was able to move beyond the physical characteristics of dedicated workplaces, such as workplace assignment or privacy in offices (Khazanchi et al., 2018; Sundstrom et al., 1980), and observe that workers perceive material aspects of places and enact three affordances to create temporary workplaces. Also, I found that places like accommodations or coworking spaces presented different physical environments, yet they could offer workers the opportunity to enact the same affordances. Based on these findings, I argued that what constitutes a
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