Page 22 - WHERE WE WORK - Schlegelmilch

Introduction
Carvalho, 2014). Nevertheless, the continuous changes of locations and people regularly put the worker in new physical and social settings, which makes stability of work settings a challenge. To stay productive in a hyperspatial setting, workers need to deal with the uncertainty that is inherent to it: uncertainty of how they can connect socially and digitally to people and resources.
To complicate matters, physical environments differ in how they afford and hinder certain activities and workers “shape and re-appropriate [the] spatial infrastructure according to their needs and comfort” (Bilandzic, 2013, p. 223). For example, they interact with the physical environment by unpacking materials (Gripsrud & Hjorthol, 2012) or by reaching out to others to create a sense of belonging in a new location (Polson, 2013). As the repertory of places broadens where work activities can be conducted and workers have the increasing technological ability to set up shop anywhere irrespective of a specific geographic location (Barley et al., 2017; Kiesler & Cummings, 2002; Porter & van den Hooff, 2020), we need to understand how workers interact with the material environment and to identify the commonalities and differences between the places.
In chapter 2, I investigate the intricate issues of how work is conducted in hyperspatial settings by studying, in an exemplary capacity, entrepreneurial and freelance digital nomads who mobilized their resources to achieve location-independence and change workplaces frequently (Jarrahi et al., 2019; Reichenberger, 2017; Sutherland & Jarrahi, 2017). Furthermore, though the employees in chapter 3 are to a lesser extent mobile and are so for work purposes, their experience can also shed additional light on how employees deal with the challenge of stability when trying to collaborate during a time of change to their workplaces.
1.2.2 Semispatial
I refer to a work setting as semispatial when it is characterized by mobility between recurring workplaces and that workers are often remote to colleagues and, or, clients. Similar to a hyperspatial setting, workers have
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