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Introduction
our efforts to understand and compare them with each other. Therefore, I propose to take a spatiality lens in my dissertation, as I outline hereafter.
The notion of spatiality has received increasing attention in practitioner and academic conversations to, broadly, address the changes concerning places of work, specifically the increasing mobility and remoteness of work settings. While place and space are differently defined across the literature (e.g., Brown & O’Hara, 2003; Dourish, 2006; Harrison & Dourish, 1997), in this dissertation, I will use space to refer to the digital world and place to refer to the physical environment. Also, the term workplace denotes a wide variety of individual locations, spanning corporate offices, mobile workplaces (e.g., trains, planes) or coworking spaces. This reflects the increasingly “dizzying array of choices” in workplaces (Elsbach & Pratt, 2007, p. 182) that emerged in relation to the digital technology allowing organizations and their workers to work flexibly across locations .
To understand how place matters in digital work, I propose three increasing degrees of spatiality of work settings. I distinguish between hyperspatial, semispatial, and sedentary degree of spatiality, which can be characterized along the dimensions of mobility and remoteness (Table 1.1). Thereby, mobility and remoteness are conceptualized as the context rather than the object of study and their combination reflects a work setting’s degree of spatiality. This allows me to study how workers experience and deal with different degrees of spatiality, and their consequences. I elaborate on each degree of spatiality and identify the associated key challenge for the workers hereafter.
1.2.1 Hyperspatial
When a work setting is hyperspatial, the worker continuously changes between a multitude of geographical locations and is remote to colleagues and clients. For a hyperspatial work setting, workers mobilize their resources by digitizing them, such as the hardware, access to files and professional support, and conduct productive activities (Ciolfi & de
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