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Officing: Mediating Time and the Professional Self in the Support of Nomadic Work

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Abstract

Today’s mobile knowledge professionals use a diversity of digital technologies to perform their work. Much of this daily technology consumption involves a variety of activities of articulation, negotiation and repair to support their work as well as their nomadic practices. This article argues that these activities mediate and structure social relations, going beyond the usual attention given to this work as a support requirement of cooperative and mobile work. Drawing on cultural approaches to technology consumption, the article introduces the concept of ‘officing’ and its three main categories of connecting, configuring and synchronizing, to show how these activities shape and are shaped by the relationship that workers have with their time and sense of professional self. This argument is made through research of professionals at a municipal council in Sydney and at a global telecommunications firm with regional headquarters in Melbourne, trialling a smartphone prototype. This research found that while officing fuels a sense of persistent time pressure and collapse of work and life boundaries, it also supports new temporal and spatial senses and opportunities for maintaining professional identities.

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Notes

  1. 1

    Odih (2003) describes flexibility, also referred to as ‘flexibilization’ as operating along two main fronts: functional flexibility is the breaking down of functional boundaries within organizations through the use of existing sources of labour; numerical flexibility is the increase in the employment of temporary staff to call on labour only when it is needed (just-in time labour).

  2. 2

    Some exceptions are Felstead, Jewson and Walters (2005) who introduced the model of ‘plural workscapes’ to explain a major shift in the spatial organization of work in their study of professionals in the United Kingdom. Halford (2005) proposed the term ‘hybrid workspace’ to describe the blended traditional organizational, domestic and virtual workspaces of professionals, many of whom worked part of the time in the workplace and part of the time at home.

  3. 3

    The concept of appropriation used in these approaches refers to a process and as evidence of seemingly passive users or consumers exerting their agency and creativity by taking some unfamiliar object and making it their own. For more see Haddon and Silverstone (1996).

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  1. Digital Cultures Program, University of Sydney, Room S353, A20-John Woolley, Sydney, Australia

    Justine Humphry

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Humphry, J. Officing: Mediating Time and the Professional Self in the Support of Nomadic Work. Comput Supported Coop Work 23, 185–204 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-013-9197-3

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