Page 45 - WHERE WE WORK - Schlegelmilch

Affordance Privacy
(Fayard & Weeks, 2006)
Proximity
(Fayard & Weeks, 2006)
Social designation (Fayard & Weeks, 2006)
Definition
Possibility to control the boundaries of the conversation (acoustically, temporally)
Possibility to be physically close
Possibility to feel legitimate to be in a place
Features for affordance
walls enclosures barriers
physical centrality functional centrality
geography architecture/ function of room
Illustrations in the literature
Carlopio & Gardner, 1992; Fayard & Weeks, 2006; Humphry, 2013; Oldham & Brass, 1979
Fayard & Weeks, 2006
Fayard & Weeks, 2006; Perry & Brodie, 2005
Moving between places
Table 2.1 Affordances in workplaces and the literature
workers need to continuously ‘see’ affordances in the environments and decide to act upon them. The question that arises is whether workers enact the same affordances across different places.
Second, Fayard and Weeks studied affordances in the context of a fixed group of colleagues who were co-located in an office. A shared social setting, such as a fixed group of colleagues, creates similarities between workers’ experiences (Kiesler & Cummings, 2002), but when this is missing, norms and routines (the social aspect of affordances) need to come from different sources. Lastly, digital technology is essential to the digital nomads’ way of working. Thus, we need to reflect on the role they play for affording nomadic work. Taken together, we believe the context of nomadic work offers the ideal context to study affordances in a different setting because they work digitally in continuously changing places (Müller, 2016; Reichenberger, 2017) and without a fixed group of colleagues, allowing us to study if there is a pattern across these locations. Thereby, we aim to contribute towards answering the questions about how organizing for work is changing as digital technologies enable professionals more and more to
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