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Digital work is closely tied to the generation of employee data. In turn, increasing workplace digitalization leads to rising privacy challenges and corresponding employee privacy concerns. Understanding the role of privacy in digital workplaces is essential to enable digital work. On the one hand, the effects of employee privacy concerns are widely studied in research. On the other hand, little is known about what specific privacy challenges lead to employee privacy concerns in the first place. We interviewed 66 employees on their perceptions of privacy in digital workplaces. On this basis, this study proposes a conceptual model of privacy challenges that depicts mechanisms of digital work that influence employees' privacy perceptions. Our findings underline the need to understand the emergence of employee privacy challenges to facilitate the changing nature of work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the affordance of digital technologies for enhancing job performance in digital work in organizations. Drawing on the technology affordance theory, this study proposes a conceptual model for exploring the impact of digital technology affordance on job performance in digital work. Such a model is then tested and validated using structural equation modelling on the survey data collected in Australia. The results show that the use of digital technologies for digital work significantly contribute to the improvement of both in-role and innovative job performance of individuals through improved coordination, communication, knowledge sharing, and decision making. This study is the first of this kind in applying the technology affordance theory for exploring the role of digital technologies in influencing the job performance. The findings of this study are of practical significance to the continuous development of appropriate strategies and policies for the active pursuit of digital work in organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information technologies (IT) give rise to new digital work practices that challenge institutionalized work arrangements. The literature has focused on how key actors legitimate digital work practices in traditional organizations. However, digital work entails sui generis new work forms that are emerging outside of traditional organizations. Understanding legitimation of new work practices and in particular how IT are implicated in this process thus becomes an important topic in the context of digital work. Building on a multi-sited ethnographic study, we show how digital nomad work becomes legitimized by being (re)presented in practice through mundane, everyday actions. Our preliminary findings illustrate that digital nomads and IT (re)present work in three different ways: revolutionizing, adapting, and masquerading, each conditioning the legitimation of the digital nomad work practice. We contribute to the literature on digital work and legitimation by conceptualizing legitimation as a material-performative rather than exclusively social process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The digital transition underway combines different types of technology: digital, physical and biological. These three families of technologies interact, drawing on the progress in artificial intelligence and machine learning, and creating the opportunity of digitalizing all stages of production and services systems. The increase of digital work represents a deep transformation of economy and society, posing huge challenges to companies, employees and policy makers, and therefore to social scientists. In this context, in European countries, working time regulation has become central to employment policies. The guiding principles of working time management are based on three aspects: the conventional definition of working time flexibility; the development of public measures that aim at making the reduction of working hours advantageous; and the adequacy of working time management to the whole of working life. Advances in information and communication technologies that bring high convenience to personal life are also blurring the lines of work-time and personal time, threatening work-life balance. This situation is raising not only important legal issues, but also ethical considerations related to mandatory or unpaid overtime, and the possibility of employer subtle or explicit coercion. Additionally, the ethicality of unconventional shift work and long work-hour schedules is also at stake in issues like the gender-based inequities related to working hours, and employers' responsibilities for protecting individuals who are not employees from the indirect effects of demanding work schedules, namely affecting the work-family balance. In terms of research methods, after an assessment of the transformations underway, based on literature review and documentary analysis, we will develop a qualitative approach with semi-structured interviews, which will allow to analyse the position of different key actors (employers' and trade union confederations) on long working hours and their effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital technologies are reconfiguring how work is organised and how digital workers are led. Management and leadership research have conventionally assumed that organisations require top-down, hierarchical management. However, leadership in digitally enabled forms of work is bound to differ in substantial ways from more traditional in-person settings. Developing new theories that account for the dynamic and complex nature of digital work thus become important to understand how work is lead. Building on a multi-site ethnographic study of digital nomads, this research-in-progress shows how leadership emerges among independent digital workers. We focus on leadership emergence that is decentred from individual human leaders and instead foregrounds how direction is socially and materially produced. Our preliminary findings illustrate that in digital work leadership is emerging along three stages: mobilising the peer network, growing a digital audience, and building a global community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pillars of digital change (new role models, new competences, changed attitudes) are most visible in the everyday practice of staff. In the digital age of continuous transformations, we need a theoretical basis that is capable of describing an individual’s behavior in situations of uncertainty, instability, uniqueness and value conflicts. We approach this theoretical gap by joining the vision of “Reflective Practice” (Schön, 1983) and the status quo bias perspective (Kim and Kankanhalli, 2009; Lee and Joshi, 2017). By proposing a three-step mixed-method study, we try to answer the question of how work can be actually designed in the digital age. Based on our insight, we seek to develop a guideline to help organizations frame the working conditions in a future-oriented and comprehensible way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research-in-progress examines the mobilities of digital work. We study digital nomadism as an exemplary case of extremely mobile forms of digital working. The recent "mobile turn" in the social sciences provides us with theoretical grounds to understand societies that are increasing defined by dynamic, global environments (e.g., freelance work, globalization and migration) and less by the conventional foundations of society (e.g., lifelong employment, local economies and nation states). In this work, we are particularly interested in how and in which ways information technology (IT) makes new forms of (digital) working "mobile", unbound by conventional restrictions. To theorize the mobilities of digital work, we draw on ethnographic participant-observations and more than 100 firsthand and secondary interviews with digital nomads. The preliminary theoretical analysis reveals four interdependent mobilities of digital work: administrative mobility (working independently of organizations and businesses of others), spatial mobility (choosing where to work), temporal mobility (deciding when to work) and content mobility (freedom to determine the nature and contents of one's work). Digital nomads are the ideal-typical manifestation of the multiple mobilities of digital work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pillars of digital change (new role models, new competences, changed attitudes) are most visible in the everyday practice of staff. In the digital age of continuous transformations, we need a theoretical basis that is capable of describing an individual's behavior in situations of uncertainty, instability, uniqueness and value conflicts. We approach this theoretical gap by joining the vision of "Reflective Practice" (Schön, 1983) and the status quo bias perspective (Kim and Kankanhalli, 2009; Lee and Joshi, 2017). By proposing a three-step mixed-method study, we try to answer the question of how work can be actually designed in the digital age. Based on our insight, we seek to develop a guideline to help organizations frame the working conditions in a future-oriented and comprehensible way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Platform work is becoming a prevalent type of work in modern labour markets. Initial studies reveal that platforms produce desired behaviour, despite a lack of direct control. This suggests normative control, through the internalization and acting in accordance with organizational norms. This work-in-progress, an on-going study of platform resellers, contributes an initial understanding of normative control in such platform work. The findings, shown through vignettes, illustrate distinct types of normative control observed in platform reselling; shaming, a type of concertive control; striving, a form of identity regulation and partying, or normative control by distraction. These findings highlight how normative control in platform work leverages the materiality of digital media, introducing new visibilities, and engages instant feedback structures, increasingly blurring the distinction between control and non-control, underscoring the role digital media play in the production of normative control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital nomadism is a growing phenomenon wherein technology enables new forms of resistance against the norms of the market economy. However, digital nomads inevitably also comply with the market economy. In this paper, we synthesise literature about the complicating role of technology in the market economy throughout history, to develop a research framework for an empirical study of digital nomadism and the market economy. Based on this research framework, we have conducted some preliminary fieldwork, observing the emergence of five trends in how digital nomads participate in the market economy: collaborative creative consumption; self-driven and self-disciplined work; reimagination of work materials; interjurisdictional prospecting; and unregulated de-facto citizenship. These trends have a range of theoretical and practical implications that we will continue to uncover in our ongoing research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital technologies have redefined many jobs and are challenging how people define themselves at work. Scholars have long argued that people's work identities are mainly derived from the organizational environment in which they are embedded. But advances in digital technologies, in combination with a global restructuration of labor markets, have led a large segment of the workforce into alternative work arrangements outside of traditional, hierarchical corporations. Understanding work-related identities and in particular the ways in which they emerge thus becomes an important topic in the context of digital work. Building on an ethnographic study of digital nomads, this research-in-progress shows that digital workers, not associated with an organization or profession, are nonetheless able to construct work identities. Our preliminary findings illustrate how identity is emerging in the flow between two opposing practices and how this flow is continuously shaped by material, spatial, and temporal forces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enterprises are forecasted to spend more on chatbots than on mobile app development by 2021. Up to today little is known on the roles chatbots play in facilitating feedback exchange. However, digitization and automation put pressure on companies to setup digital work environments that enable reskilling of employees. Therefore, a structured analysis of feedback-related chatbots for Slack was conducted. Our results propose six archetypes that reveal the roles of chatbots in facilitating feedback exchange on performance, culture and ideas. We show that chatbots do not only consist of conversational agents integrated into instant messenger but are tightly linked to complementary frontend systems such as mobile and web apps. Like the upper part of an iceberg, the conversational agent is above water and visible within the chat, whereas many user interactions of feedback-related chatbots are only possible outside of the instant messenger. Further, we extract six design principles for chatbots as digital feedback systems. We do this by analyzing chatbots and linking empirically observed design features to (meta-)requirements derived from explanatory theory on feedback, selfdetermination and persuasive systems. The results suggest that chatbots benefit the social environment of conversation agents and the richness of the graphical user interface of external applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital nomads are individuals who use information and communication technologies (ICT) to work from remote locations while travelling for lifestyle reasons. A new type of digital nomad-corporate work relation emerges from the increasing number of digital nomads contracted to conduct work for corporations. However, the institutional logics -- the socially-constructed patterns, beliefs, values and rules that provide meaning to traditional corporates and the often-millennial digital nomads -- are substantially different between digital nomadism and corporate environments. The purpose of this paper is to understand what different institutional logics exist, which issues between digital nomads and corporates result from those differences, and how they are mitigated. These questions are answered based on an empirical study of digital nomads and corporate workers informed by institutional theory. The analysis of empirical findings allows us to propose a framework that explains how these conflicting institutional logics lead to issues and outlines mitigation methods employed to address them. The paper informs current and future digital nomads and corporate work relations by providing a better understanding of issues that occur and mitigation methods they may employ to resolve them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digitalization is enabling new and novel forms of work. One such emerging form of work manifests itself in the rise of sharing economy. In this study, we explore the duality, i.e. the positive and negative outcomes, of work enabled by a sharing economy platform, Uber. We identify a set of positive and negative outcomes the workers attribute to their work for the sharing economy platform as well as characteristics of the digital platform enabling these outcomes. Furthermore, by drawing on theory of work relations, we theorize how the dimensions (temporal, physical, and administrative) of work relations manifest themselves in work done for a sharing economy platform. We found that freedom that consists of control of time, source of income, and self-employment represents the positive side of work. Price reduction, one-sided termination of contract, and lack of control reflect the power disparity between workers and the platform. We further identified three mechanisms in the digital platform that enable the duality, namely resource connecting, data control, and work distribution. Our findings imply that the data control mechanism is a key contributor to power disparity experienced by Uber drivers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital working is often seen to be replacing office-based work practices. This study captures the opposite, the entanglement of features of both physical and digital by software development teams in a multinational IT company. We observed how these software development teams crafted three types of entangled workspaces, characterised by different modulations of digital and physical features of their environment. We take an ontogenetic view of space that sees space as performative and constantly in the making to study the crafting of these entangled workspaces which transcend both physical and digital environments. This sociospatial view provides a novel conceptual basis to study the role of space in digital working. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the domain of digital work, a new phenomenon has emerged that is increasingly referred to as "digital nomadism". Digital nomadism involves mostly Western professionals using a range of information systems (IS) and information technology (IT) tools to work digitally over the Internet while travelling perpetually in typically exotic locations. Existing theories of reasons for IS/IT use seem to have limited applicability to digital nomadism because technological and economic aspects need to be considered jointly with sociological and anthropological aspects for a comprehensive theoretical understanding of digital nomadism. Grounded in the findings of in-depth ethnographic and digital-ethnographic research, the study presented here develops theory and generates new knowledge in regard to the justification used in digital nomadism. It answers to the research question: Why do people engage in digital nomadism? The preliminary data analysis reveals three themes that explain how people justify their engagement in digital nomadism. The theoretical analysis positions these three themes in wider value systems (orders of worth). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Our paper theorizes how complex work is accomplished in online labor markets, where market actors work with little shared history, context, or chance of future interactions. In contrast to research that characterizes online labor markets by their automated matches and prespecified contracts, our model theorizes processes of online labor transactions as collaborative, relational, and imperfectly defined in nature. We integrate a digital ethnography of an online labor market with relational contracting theory to introduce the process of provisional contracting: the practices clients and contractors use to develop credibility and clarity during one-off interactions with often fluctuating contracts. Clients begin relationships by seeking personal experience with contractors' credibility, even though credibility is formally coded in market ratings. These early interactions begin to establish the relational contract, with each party signaling why they should be trusted beyond the protections of the market. Then, throughout their entire engagement, clients and contractors continuously interact to establish and repair a shared sense of clarity about the work, which is always imperfectly defined. Lastly, clients use features of the market platform to threaten or promise future consequences for discretionary behavior, establishing a weak "shadow of the future," even though they may not interact again. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]