Page 27 - WHERE WE WORK - Schlegelmilch

Introduction
what conditions need to be met to do so and how different aspects in places afforded them. As the interviews accumulate, I complement them with field observations and I conduct 104 hours of observations in ten co-working spaces, visit a two-day practitioner's conference about digital nomads and embark on a two-week embedded field visit to two digital nomad hotspots. Especially the field visit allows be to further improve my understanding of the challenges that digital workers encounter in a hyperspatial setting, how they create temporary work environments to address the challenge of stability and what role the physical environment plays. I can observe in others as well as experience myself by seeing firsthand what it means to be nomadic.
Similarly, in chapter 3, I build on the findings about working in multiple places but here I seek to understand the challenge of coordination in semispatial work settings in an organizational context. This study takes place at a global company, TechSub, which temporarily closed their office for renovation while continuing ‘business as usual’. During this radical change, I investigate how workplace configurations shape work relationship. I collect 25 interviews, 25 video blogs and 135 pages of documents that cover a period of around two years of TechSub’s office transformation. Already during the data collection, I iterate between data and literature to develop an understanding of the issues at hand and provide a gateway for subsequent data collection. As I code the data, I create an in-depth account of how the temporary closure of the office affects the employees’ relationships with coworkers, and how they cope with the challenge of coordination.
Lastly, the sedentary work setting requires a different kind of approach because, in chapter 4, I address a different kind of research problem, namely “transform[ing] poorly understood phenomenon into distinct and measurable constructs“ (Bamberger & Ang, 2016, p. 3), thereby making it ideal for a quantitative approach. I study the challenge to interact effectively. Also, I focus on whether the spatial characteristic workplace transparency increases employees’ innovative behaviors in open offices, and how workplace flexibility moderates this relationship. To do so, I
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