As digital technologies have matured, various forms of distributed working have become commonplace. The contemporary workforce includes many people who move between different sites during the course of a working day or week, and who switch between offline working and diverse forms of online work and mediated communication and work in virtual teams. Organizationally sanctioned online communications and digital repositories are used alongside extra-organizational resources such as social media and informal face-to-face conversations. Professional and personal activities share communication channels, and boundaries between work and non-work can become blurred. Work is thus both spatially and temporally complex.
This complexity provides many challenges for the researcher aiming to capture and understand these practices, tracking activities, and their meanings for participants, across multiple formats connected in an unpredictable fashion. This meeting focuses on a key question for studies of contemporary work across disciplines: how can we combine methods or devise new methods to capitalise on diverse forms of data, in order to build rich and theoretically-fruitful understandings of digitally-suffused working life? The meeting draws on expertise across a range of disciplines, including management and organization studies, sociology, anthropology, Science and Technology Studies, work psychology, design. informatics and HCI. We aim to promote a cross-fertilization of approaches across disciplines.
ORGANISERS
Dr Christine Hine, Department of Sociology, University of Surrey
Prof Gillian Symon, Royal Holloway University of London
Dr Katrina Pritchard, Swansea University.
The event is organized in association with the Digital World Research Centre at the University of Surrey. The meeting has received funding from the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Surrey and the RCUK-funded NEMODE Network Plus.
POST-EVENT PUBLICATION
Research Methods for Digital Work and Organization, Published by OUP, January 2022
