Suchergebnisse

This article draws on personal experiences of remote work that is facilitated by virtual or on‐line communication and collaboration technologies. This personal story illustrates how technology, work, and lifecycle coevolve and how the integration of work, family, and friends into the new, virtual workspaces can open up new conceptualizations of personal identity. An identity that is discretely bounded and that is dependent on physical surroundings can give way to one that more closely aligns with the lived experiences of mobile work and life. If we think of identity as multiple, as open to possibility, and as flexibly responsive to multiple cultures and contexts, we can alter our ideas about work and its relationship to our lives in ways that more closely align with today's hybridized, dematerialized and decontextualized world.

Many employees recognize that they are doing major amounts of professional work away from what might be considered their official workspace. Some knowledge workers are beginning to see a different world for themselves where work and home are allowed to blur and where periods of paid work alternate throughout the day with periods devoted to family and leisure. Because of rapid improvements in technology and changes in the global economy, worker mobility and distributed work have become a central topic for employees and companies alike. In this volume we begin to remedy a shortcoming in the literature on these topics by center‐staging accounts of personal experience. Contributors' narratives revolve around observations they made about their own behavior, illustrations of successes, and descriptions of the tensions inherent in mobile life and work. Thus, the articles reflect the authors' self‐conscious awareness of their individual mobile lives and, most importantly, how their lives contribute to and are shaped by larger societal patterns. In this introduction we provide an overview of the individual articles that follow, as well as some background for an informed reading, by discussing some of the driving forces behind the transition from conventional work styles to mobile and distributed patterns of work. We critically review some of the literature on the work and lifestyle transition that constitutes the central theme for this volume, including the effects of globalization, the development of tools for remote collaboration, and the blurring of home and office work. We elaborate our review of the literature on mobility and distributed work to highlight the stylistic, methodological, and topical contributions of this volume, thereby deepening our understanding of how this new mobility fits into the broader cultural and economic landscape.

In this concluding chapter, we articulate four salient patterns that emerge from the contributors' eight narratives about mobile work and life: (1) the performance, presentation, and meaning of work, when activities are interwoven in personal, relational, and work spheres across contexts; (2) the multiplicity in identity and self‐presentation; (3) the context and the decontextualization and recontextualization of meaning in changing spaces; and (4) the technological change and dexterity as well as the centrality of communication technologies in defining and redefining what it means to be a mobile worker. We explore each of these themes by referencing examples from the narratives to illustrate how mobile work is redefining the very meaning of work and its place in our lives. We conclude by suggesting directions for further research on mobility in the workplace.