The availability of digital technologies offers the opportunity to reshape work and life. In particular, the traditional spatial and temporal restrictions for workspaces are increasingly being reduced.
Even beyond COVID-19, many office employees will continue to work, at least partly, from home. Although the degree of virtualization will continue to increase, a combination of physical and virtual presence can be expected. Hybrid forms of working will become part of our future private and professional life.
Working from home goes hand in hand with great potential, but at the same time also with risks. Recent experiences with home schooling and home office have triggered intensive discussions on potential positive and negative outcomes of co-locating work with private and schooling activities. There is a need to design digital technologies appropriately to support individuals, groups and organizations in ways that increase productivity and wellbeing. Thus, pursuing a socio-technical paradigm for understanding and designing for the home office is essential. The fields of Information Systems (IS), Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), and Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) have a long tradition in designing from a socio-technical perspective. Building on this tradition, we believe that existing work practices in the home office need to be analyzed and understood more intensively. Digital technologies must be designed and tailored to fit into the complexities of the home office. New descriptive and prescriptive knowledge must be provided to fully leverage the potential of working from home.
This special issue welcomes a diversity of submissions and is hence open for empirical, design-oriented, and conceptual research focusing on working from home. Manuscripts may employ qualitative, quantitative, engineering, mixed methods, or innovative research designs. They may address the individual, group or organizational level.
Thus, topics may include, but are not limited to, the following areas:
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Empirical studies of work practices and social practices in home offices
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Innovative designs of digital technologies in support of home office work, e.g., NeuroIS (e.g., eye-tracking-based or physio-adaptive IS), conversational agents or AR-/VR-based IS
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Methods and techniques for implementing and operating home offices
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New conceptualizations and theories of working from home
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Individual-, group-, organization-, and multi-level studies of home office working antecedents and outcomes from a social, psychological, and performance perspective
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Appropriation of digital technologies for working from home
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Studies on innovative hybrid home office designs and corresponding office designs
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Leading and managing working from home
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Gender studies on working from home
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Studies on control and surveillance and its avoidance in home offices
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Studies on hybrid service provision from home
All submissions should cover digital aspects of working from home and open the "black box" of information technology (i.e., shed light on specific aspects of the applied IT artifacts).