Page 78 - WHERE WE WORK - Schlegelmilch

Moving between places
what role the physical place plays in their organizing. To answer this question, we took an affordance lens and explored the question: What are the affordances of nomadic work? Interviews with digital nomads across different professions and field observations in their workplaces across countries revealed three affordances of nomadic work (malleability, privacy, and instant sociality). Through enacting these three affordances, the nomadic workers to cope with the challenges arising from continuous travel in nomadic work (working across places, conducting focused work and embedding socially). Furthermore, we learned from comparing typical places in nomadic work based on the affordances that the we need to treat the concept of workplace more comprehensively. Our findings have implications, as we will discuss next.
2.5.1 Theoretical contributions
Our contribution is threefold. Our first contribution is to the literature on digital nomads (Jarrahi et al., 2019; Müller, 2016; Reichenberger, 2017; Sutherland & Jarrahi, 2017) by studying how digital nomads interact with their environment to create temporary workplaces. To our knowledge, we are the first to offer a detailed account of how these digital workers enact the affordances of nomadic work. That is, we identified the three affordances of malleability, privacy, and instant sociality. Research on digital nomads is still nascent and has only, so far, defined digital nomadism (Reichenberger, 2017) and detailed the nomads’ digital practices (Jarrahi et al., 2019), such as knowledge management (Jarrahi et al., 2019), branding, or contracting (Sutherland & Jarrahi, 2017). We extend this work by turning the researcher’s attention toward the role of the physical environment in line with the ‘spatial turn’ in organization studies (de Vaujany & Mitev, 2013; Van Marrewijk & Yanow, 2017; Weinfurtner & Seidl, 2019). We also build on Fayard and Weeks (2006), who found in their study on informal interaction in office places that social aspects in an environment afford and constrain the workers' actions. Indeed, we also found that it is the combination of physical and social aspects in the places that produce the affordances and enable digital nomads to create temporary workplaces,
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