Page 79 - WHERE WE WORK - Schlegelmilch

Moving between places
embed socially, and conduct focused work. In contrast to Fayard and Weeks’ study on a designated workplace, we extend the findings to non- designated workplaces as well. In doing so, we go beyond stating that digital nomads work anywhere and anytime, instead demonstrate how they achieve this in a variety of locations. We focused on the interaction of physical and social aspects and viewed digital technology as an enabler. Thus, future studies should consider the role of digital technology more actively. For example, how the physical locations and the digital platforms to locate other workers relate to each other.
Second, we build on and extend research on contemporary workplaces. We do so by comparing typical places found in nomadic work: co-working spaces, cafés, and housing. Previous research has addressed various workplaces separately, for example, co-working spaces workplaces (Gerdenitsch et al., 2016; Spinuzzi, 2012) and third workplaces (Di Marino & Lapintie, 2015; Kingma, 2016). By discussing to what extent affordances of nomadic work were perceived to be present in each place, we were able to see similarities and differences between the places beyond their physical characteristics. Reflecting on this, we find that the term workplace needs to use more comprehensively. Specifically, we suggest that what constitutes a workplace is less about what the place is intended for but rather how the place is perceived to be used. As digital technologies enable continuously higher degree of flexibility and mobility (e.g., Aguinis & Lawal, 2013; Ashford et al., 2007; Colbert et al., 2016), the places of work will become even less clearly defined. This not to say that dedicated places such as corporate offices are not workplaces, but instead that other, non-dedicated, places can also become (temporary) workplaces. Future research could take a broader selection of places and study their potential to be enacted as workplaces. Another avenue of future research may be to investigate more in-depth how the workers’ perception of a place matches or clashes with the existing norms in the place, and how they deal with such tensions in their interaction with the environment.
Moreover, our research further highlights a paradox: Unlike the terms ‘working anywhere’ or ‘location-independently’ seem to suggest,
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