Page 80 - WHERE WE WORK - Schlegelmilch

Moving between places
‘place’ is the first concern of digital nomads. Thus, place moves from the background to the foreground of organizing. Similarly, Liegl (2014) found that the "guiding question ... seems to be, "Where can I work best?" ... what seems to be a rhythmic interaction of workers with their work environment, where this environment might enable work ... for a certain period of time, and then it is time to move on." (p. 178). We showed how nomadic workers need to answer the question of ‘where’ on a continuous basis. This suggests that when studying knowledge workers without a designated place, we need not only consider the digital space where digital nomads dwell but also their physical place. As the affordance of instant sociality attests to that places play an influential role in relationships. While work has emphasized the increasing importance of relationships for work (Heaphy et al., 2018; Khazanchi et al., 2018), we know much less about workplace implications for relationships (Khazanchi et al., 2018; Rockmann & Pratt, 2015). A next could be to investigate how the places shape relationships as today’s workplaces become more interdependent (Barley & Kunda, 2001; Grant & Parker, 2009).
Lastly, we also add to the discussion of how the connectedness of temporary workplaces blur the spatial boundary between work and leisure (Cousins & Robey, 2015; Prasopoulou et al., 2017). It seems that for digital nomads, the distinction between work and life is irrelevant in their physical and social environment. Specifically, the spatial boundary between work and life is blurring as workers change between enacting privacy and instant sociality in the same place. More so, the digital nomads enabled intertwining these contexts in their digital and physical environments. Thereby, digital nomads find themselves in ‘interspaces’ – places that are not clearly part of either place (Burrell & Dale, 2008). Similar developments have been observed for social media users in organizations (Leonardi & Vaast, 2017). We suggest that what we observed is akin to 'context collapse' in social media research, which refers "to how people, information, and norms from one context seep into the bounds of another" (Davis & Jurgenson, 2014, p. 477). Context collapse came about because social media platforms afford to address multiple audiences - people belonging
78