Page 97 - WHERE WE WORK - Schlegelmilch

Reconfiguring workplaces
Therefore, we decided to take an inductive approach to this study (Charmaz, 2006; Corbin & Strauss, 1990), collected data on the lived experience and natural field data (Silverman, 2011), and iterated between the data and extant theory (Eisenhardt, 1989). In doing so, we explored how relationships are created and maintained at work and thereby, “fill[ing] in what has been left out—that is by extending and refining its existing categories and relationships” (Locke, 2001, p. 103).
3.3.1 Research setting
We selected TechCorp (our pseudonym), a technology company with more than 100,000 employees worldwide. We focused on one of their European subsidiaries, TechSub (our pseudonym), as the empirical setting of our research. TechSub made the radical decision to close its corporate office for several months while continuing ‘business as usual’. In total, around 900 employees worked at TechSub in the months around the temporary closure.
3.3.2 Data sources
We purposefully sampled and 25 interviewees at TechSub because they were in an organizational context where the phenomenon of interest was most likely to be visible (Patton, 1990). Specifically, we were interested in understanding how employees cope with a change in their workplace configuration and how this impacts their work relationships. The case of TechSub is well suited for this aim. First, the company's decision to remove the corporate headquarters from the employee's workplace configuration created conditions of profound change. Second, the company provided the employees with the technology to work flexibly and remotely for over a decade; thus, this stayed constant. Third, the change from a configuration with a shared office, to one without a shared office allows us to compare both settings.
All our respondents were knowledge workers, consisting of customer-focused (e.g., technical specialists), client-focused (account
95