Page 82 - WHERE WE WORK - Schlegelmilch

Moving between places
findings regarding the affordances of work. People in their 40s and older are often in a different life situation than those in their 20s, for example, having responsibility for a family or financial obligation (e.g., a loan). This may lead to a reduced inclination to start working and traveling. It is also conceivable that this stems from a difference in digital fluency (Briggs & Makice, 2011), or virtual intelligence (Makarius & Larson, 2017), which tend to be higher among digital natives rather than digital immigrants. While we aimed to counteract an age selection bias using online and offline sampling methods, future research should account for this.
Third, we viewed digital technology as an enabler in our investigation of the affordances of nomadic work. While this was adequate for our purpose, it may have underemphasized the role of digital technology for nomadic work. Digital nomads’ way of working depends on digital technology (Müller, 2016; Reichenberger, 2017), just as digital technology is permeating social life . Therefore, future studies should consider how the physical and digital spaces interact, for example, by investigating how the community of users of nomad platforms (to locate other workers) relate to the workplaces. These platforms for nomads are to a certain extent similar to the TripAdvisor platform for tourists, which has been found to have a big impact on the business in the hospitality sector (Scott & Orlikowski, 2012).
Lastly, the professions that were included in the study varied widely among participants. Therefore, we could not account for the particular nature of jobs (Barley et al., 2017; Boell et al., 2016). For example, there may be differences between a coach whose core business are confidential conversations and a graphic designer who works mostly individually. Since the worker’s intention are an important element in the enactment of affordances, I can imagine that workers with different types of jobs ‘see’ different affordances. Particularly, the intention acts as a filter to seeing in the place what can be potentially enabling and constraining features. Nevertheless, we carefully selected our participants so that they were all knowledge workers and using digital technology to work irrespective of changing locations. Future studies should further investigate the nature of
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