Page 44 - WHERE WE WORK - Schlegelmilch

Moving between places
the office and found three relevant affordances: privacy, proximity, and social designation. Privacy refers to the possibility to control the boundaries of a conversation (acoustically and temporally). This definition builds on a large body of research focusing on the flow of information between self and other, and vice versa (Laurence et al., 2013; Sundstrom et al., 1982). When privacy is low in a workplace, workers can feel monitored (Laurence et al., 2013). The material features enabling the enactment of this affordance are often described as physical structures that create (semi-)enclosed places (Fayard & Weeks, 2006). While enclosures are common in conventional offices with smaller rooms, workers need to activate this affordance when working in more open places such as open offices or co-working spaces. The second affordance, proximity, is the possibility to be physically close, which stems from the physical and/or functional centrality of a place (Fayard & Weeks, 2006). For example, if a room where people need to be to do their work, such as a photocopy room, has functional centrality. By arriving at this conceptualization of proximity, the authors provided a different understanding of proximity than extant literature. Though many scholars have studied proximity, it is most often interpreted as geographical distance between two people (e.g., Bernstein & Turban, 2018; Khazanchi et al., 2018; Sundstrom et al., 1994). And lastly, social designation refers to the feeling of legitimacy to be in a place that stems from its “geography, architecture and function” (Fayard & Weeks, 2006, p. 623). These three affordances highlight that understanding the social component (the actor), or the material component (physical or digital) separately is not sufficient (Table 2.1). Instead, it is their interaction that explains how people use places. Also, their study showed that places have physical and social elements (e.g., norms, rules) that play into the interaction of the actor with the environment.
While we have learned from Fayard and Week’s (2006) study about affordances in a conventional office, the places and affordances of nomadic work are most likely different, and we are interested in studying them for several reasons. For one, the physical environment is varied and continuously changes for nomadic workers (as shown in the previous section). Thus, when workers do not have one designated or fixed location,
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