Page 38 - WHERE WE WORK - Schlegelmilch

Moving between places
Increasingly, place has played a role in theory development as an essential part of work (Ayoko & Ashkanasy, 2020; Davis, 1984; Khazanchi et al., 2018). And while we know what digital nomads are, we know little about how physical places enable how they work. This is the focal concern of our paper. The extant literature on digital nomads has focused on the digital space (Jarrahi et al., 2019; Jarrahi & Thomson, 2017). In the broader literature on workers, place is often treated as the backdrop, or something fixed that influences behavior and satisfaction of workers (Davis, 1984; Sundstrom et al., 1980, 1994). To understand how digital nomads interact with the physical place, we apply an affordance lens (Fayard & Weeks, 2007; Gibson, 1979), which focuses on the interaction of actor goals and intentions with the material environment, instead of looking at each of them as separate entities (Gibson, 1979). From this follows our research question: How are workplaces enacted in nomadic work?
In this paper, we study how digital nomads work in places by drawing on 45 interviews, 124 hours of observations in (work)places, a full- time two-week field visit as well as participation in a digital nomad conference. Our participants vary widely across professions (e.g., coaches, consultants, programmers) and across degrees of mobility. Through analyzing the qualitative data, we traced the affordances of nomadic work.
This paper makes contributions to the literature on digital nomads and contemporary workplaces. First, we contribute to the evolving body of literature on digital nomads (Jarrahi et al., 2019; Müller, 2016; Reichenberger, 2017; Sutherland & Jarrahi, 2017) by showing how digital nomads enact affordances to solve the challenges in organizing for nomadic work. We provide a detailed account of the three affordances of nomadic work: malleability, privacy and instant sociality. Second, our study advances the discussions on contemporary workplaces. Previous research has investigated new work locations separately, such as co-working spaces (Garrett et al., 2014; Gerdenitsch et al., 2016; Spinuzzi, 2012) and third workplaces (Kingma, 2016). We extend this work by comparing three typical workplaces of nomadic work with each other, namely co-working spaces, cafés, and housing. In doing so, a paradox became apparent, namely that
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