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Introduction
considerable freedom of movement and need to mobilize most resources (Ciolfi & de Carvalho, 2014). However, some of the uncertainty that is present in hyperspatial settings is mitigated in the semispatial setting by the recurrence of workplaces. Rather, the key challenge in semispatial settings stems from the asynchronous movement of workers between multiple locations. Asynchronous means that each digital worker is a moving piece in the network of their (work) organization. And as workers can work increasingly mobile and remote to each other (Barley et al., 2017; Kiesler & Cummings, 2002; Porter & van den Hooff, 2020), their movements are not necessarily synchronous towards the same locations at the same time. The need to meet others combined with the asynchronicity of people’s movement across workplaces creates the challenge to coordinate people across digital and physical places in order to conduct work.
“multiple locations such as customer sites, company offices, their homes, vendor offices, planes, and hotels“ (Richman et al., 2001, p. 9). Research on mobile knowledge workers has been particularly concerned with how mobile knowledge workers deal with the physical environment of a specific type of place, e.g. offices (Fayard & Weeks, 2006; Garrett et al., 2014; Irving et al., 2019; Oldham & Brass, 1979; Spinuzzi, 2012) or the digital infrastructure to bridge distance between people (Erickson & Jarrahi, 2016; Mark & Su, 2010; Polson, 2013). Thereby, prior research overlooked the multitude of places that are part of the
worker’s repertory.
In chapter 3, I examine how typical mobile knowledge workers deal with the removal of a central workplace to their set of recurring workplaces, thereby changing their semispatial setting from being somewhat remote to colleagues to being fully remote and how it impacts their work relationships. In addition, in chapter 4 I test the implications of (not) sharing an office with colleagues for accessing information about work and interacting with colleagues.
Semispatial work settings where workers – often mobile knowledge
workers – conduct work, can be
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