Sheikh, Kamaran (2020) Spaces of working in modern software organisations. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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Abstract

The growing use of digital media in the workplace is shifting work to digital platforms, whilst digital working is often seen to be replacing office-based work practices. This study captures the opposite. It explores the appropriation of features of both physical and digital environments by collocated software development teams in a multinational IT company. These environments are designed in isolation, yet they become integrated in practice by employees.

This study is positioned within the information systems literature as a step to address the gap on digital work and understand the essential role played by the physical environment in the usage and appropriation of digital tools in modern organisations. It posits a view of space as constantly in the making through sociospatial practices. It empirically demonstrates that the physical environment is not only integral to work practices and deeply entangled with digital interactions and activities, but space emerges as a result of a mutual shaping, where physical and digital coexist in tightly woven symbiotic form.

In this manner, this study extends existing knowledge through four novel concepts including a combined theorisation to understand how work is performed in modern digital organisations: (a) spatial work practices extend the concept of spatial practices (de Certeau 1984) as they are intrinsically attached to work activities. They are responsible for the creation and the dismantling of (b) physical-digital assemblages, which conceptualise and explain how actors combine and configure elements from the physical environment and digital technologies to create (c) spatialities, as planned spatial effects to influence the way in which work activities are performed. These concepts are integrated through the emergent framework of (d) crafted workspaces, which enables the theorisation of new types of organisational space that transcend traditional dichotomous notions of physical or digital.

This research thus responds to recent calls for a ‘spatial turn’ in organisational studies and information systems literature, enabling modern working practices to be understood and effectively integrated into modern organisations, whilst in turn calling for greater attention to space as a performative and constitutive element of digital work in information systems research.

Item Type:	Thesis or Dissertation (PhD)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor H Social Sciences > HF Commerce
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Office layout, Computer software industry -- Employees, Computer software industry -- Labor productivity, Teams in the workplace
Official Date:	January 2020
Dates:	Date Event January 2020 UNSPECIFIED
Institution:	University of Warwick
Theses Department:	Warwick Business School
Thesis Type:	PhD
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Supervisor(s)/Advisor:	Baptista, João (John) ; Albuquerque, João Porto de
Format of File:	pdf
Extent:	xii, 208 leaves : illustrations (some colour)
Language:	eng

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