Mobile Knowledge Workers Research Articles

Communities in Coworking Spaces: Boundary Work and Social Identity Work by Community Managers

AbstractThe use of coworking spaces – flexible, shared workplaces for mobile knowledge workers – has gained popularity among entrepreneurs, small‐business owners, and freelancers over the last decade. Coworking spaces shape a social setting for a community, within which mobile knowledge workers can network, collaborate, and share ideas. This study adopts a social‐symbolic work perspective to explore how founders and community managers create and curate the communities in their coworking spaces. Based on qualitative data gathered from 16 coworking spaces, we elaborate on how founders and community managers can integrate boundary work and social identity work in their social‐symbolic work practices to create a sense of community.

Job Titles and Mobility of Knowledge Workers

How do job titles affect an employee’s propensity for outward mobility? In high-tech contexts, firms are constantly at risk of losing their high quality human capital, such as inventors, due to an increasingly significant threat of employee poaching. Recruiters seek for credible quality signals to assess candidates, and job titles are the first piece of information available. In this paper, we study the role of job title ambiguity for knowledge workers’ mobility. Specifically, we whether ambiguous job titles may create a barrier to outward mobility for knowledge workers in markets with high risk of poaching. Ambiguous job titles may confuse prospective recruiters when they scan poaching targets; they exert more cognitive effort to make sense of the value of those candidates and, thus, are less likely to contact them for mobility opportunities. We utilize the resumes and patent data of 12,719 corporate inventors employed at 172 US corporations in the Information and Communication Technology industry between 2000 and 2014 to test our hypothesis. Our results indicate that individuals holding job titles associated with a high ambiguity are less likely to leave the firm. The result is robust to different measurement techniques of titles’ ambiguity. Our study highlights how job titles as a form of symbolic cues can constitute a meaningful barrier to poaching that complements existing human capital retaining tactics.

Skill-biased acquisitions? Human capital and employee mobility in small technology firms

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between acquisitions and mobility of knowledge workers and managers in small technology companies and how individual skills and capabilities moderate this relationship. Relying on the matched employer–employee data of the Swedish high-tech sectors from 2007 to 2015, we find that acquisitions increase the likelihood of employee departures, mainly in the form of switching to another employer, but that these acquisition effects are weaker for employees with technological competences. By contrast, the acquisition effects are found to be weaker for employees with managerial competences only when acquirers have a strong employee retention motive. When acquirers do not have a strong retention motive, managers, compared to other employees, are more likely to exit the (national) labor market after acquisitions. Our results suggest that the retention motive is a critical condition to explain post-acquisition employee turnover. Both technological and managerial competences are the types of human capital valued by acquirers when they have a strong retention motive.

PoVRPoint: Authoring Presentations in Mobile Virtual Reality.

Virtual Reality (VR) has the potential to support mobile knowledge workers by complementing traditional input devices with a large three-dimensional output space and spatial input. Previous research on supporting VR knowledge work explored domains such as text entry using physical keyboards and spreadsheet interaction using combined pen and touch input. Inspired by such work, this paper probes the VR design space for authoring presentations in mobile settings. We propose PoVRPoint-a set of tools coupling pen- and touch-based editing of presentations on mobile devices, such as tablets, with the interaction capabilities afforded by VR. We study the utility of extended display space to, for example, assist users in identifying target slides, supporting spatial manipulation of objects on a slide, creating animations, and facilitating arrangements of multiple, possibly occluded shapes or objects. Among other things, our results indicate that 1) the wide field of view afforded by VR results in significantly faster target slide identification times compared to a tablet-only interface for visually salient targets; and 2) the three-dimensional view in VR enables significantly faster object reordering in the presence of occlusion compared to two baseline interfaces. A user study further confirmed that the interaction techniques were found to be usable and enjoyable.

Knowledge worker mobility and knowledge management in MNEs: A bibliometric analysis and research agenda

The Resource-Based View suggests that for an organization to have a sustainable competitive advantage, the firm should have valuable, rare, inimitable resources and have the ability to exploit them. The Knowledge-Based View treats knowledge as an organizational resource, which resides in both the explicit and tacit knowledge held by organizations and their people. For MNEs, the tacit knowledge is transferred by the movement of knowledge workers, who take on a boundary-spanning role. However, this trend is in decline. With increasing barriers (formal and informal) to the movement of professionals, increased digitization, and Industry 4.0, the physical movement of professionals may not be required. This literature review maps the evolution of knowledge transfer by MNEs and the knowledge workers’ role. We classify the studies into six clusters related to mobility, the use of expatriates and knowledge transfer, knowledge spillover, transfer practice, relational learning, and knowledge management and post-acquisition integration. The article identifies gaps in the extant literature and sets an agenda for future research.

Digital assemblages, information infrastructures, and mobile knowledge work

We theorize mobile knowledge workers’ uses of digital and material resources in support of their working practices. We do so to advance current conceptualizations of both “information infrastructures” and “digital assemblages” as elements of contemporary knowledge work. We focus on mobile knowledge workers as they are (increasingly) self-employed (e.g., as freelancers, entrepreneurs, temporary workers, and contractors), competing for work, and collaborating with others: one likely future of work that we can study empirically. To pursue their work, mobile knowledge workers draw together collections of commodity digital technologies or digital assemblages (e.g., laptops, phones, public WiFi, cloud storage, and apps), relying on a reservoir of knowledge about new and emergent means to navigate this professional terrain. We find that digital assemblages are created and repurposed by workers in their infrastructuring practices and in response to mobility demands and technological environments. In their constitution, they are generative to both collaborative and organizational goals. Building from this, we theorize that digital assemblages, as individuated forms of information infrastructure, sustain stability and internal cohesion even as they allow for openness and generativity.

Diversity in Coworking Spaces: A Comparative Keyword Analysis of Online Customer Reviews

Coworking spaces emerged as a new type of shared workspace for entrepreneurs and mobile knowledge workers but significant differences exist among coworking spaces. For instance, coworking in corporate franchise occupied with thousands of members and coworking in independent operators with relatively small group of coworkers offers vastly different experience. We examine the differences of coworking spaces based on users’ perceptions of coworking spaces collected from online customer reviews. This paper uses a novel research method, comparative keyword analysis, and finds strong evidence that operation types of coworking spaces are closely related to the differences in members’ coworking experiences. Specifically, we find that independent coworking space are salient for its positive review mentioning the keyword ‘entrepreneur’.

Breaking the Screen: Interaction Across Touchscreen Boundaries in Virtual Reality for Mobile Knowledge Workers.

Virtual Reality (VR) has the potential to transform knowledge work. One advantage of VR knowledge work is that it allows extending 2D displays into the third dimension, enabling new operations, such as selecting overlapping objects or displaying additional layers of information. On the other hand, mobile knowledge workers often work on established mobile devices, such as tablets, limiting interaction with those devices to a small input space. This challenge of a constrained input space is intensified in situations when VR knowledge work is situated in cramped environments, such as airplanes and touchdown spaces. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of interacting jointly between an immersive VR head-mounted display and a tablet within the context of knowledge work. Specifically, we 1) design, implement and study how to interact with information that reaches beyond a single physical touchscreen in VR; 2) design and evaluate a set of interaction concepts; and 3) build example applications and gather user feedback on those applications.

Relinquish or Rejuvenate? How Firms Treat Inventions after Inventor Departure

Knowledge worker mobility is often considered as detrimental to knowledge creation and retention for sourcing firms. Integrating insights from the knowledge-based view of the firm and the innovative search literature, we propose that knowledge worker mobility has a dual impact: the loss of tacit knowledge associated with mobility is both a threat to invention value and an opportunity for knowledge rejuvenation. Analyzing a matched sample of over 23,000 inventors and their patented inventions granted during a twenty-year period, we find that firms are less likely to maintain inventions if their inventors leave. However, if maintained, left-behind inventions generate more novel recombination in later development. The dual impact of inventor mobility is further contingent on inventor collaboration networks and knowledge complexity. Our findings show that the tacit knowledge possessed by inventors is a double-edged sword, with implications for research on knowledge worker mobility and knowledge management practice.

Student migration aspirations and mobility in the global knowledge society: The case of Ghana

In a global knowledge society, progress is driven by knowledge workers. Therefore, we must analyze migration and the mobility of knowledge workers in this new light. University students are both knowledge workers and knowledge-workers-to-be. Hence, this paper examines the migration aspirations of undergraduate university students in the Global South, exemplified by the West African nation Ghana. Increased access to higher education in Ghana and the Global South in general provides many more young people the opportunity to study, but the massive demand for education is still not being met, and access is woefully inadequate from the secondary level up to higher education. In addition, although the economy is growing steadily, graduate unemployment or underemployment is a major issue. This is the context for many students in and from the Global South. I argue that having the ability to migrate—mobility—is an unevenly distributed good, and partaking productively in the global knowledge society is highly conditional on a student’s country of origin.By taking the theoretical approach that aspiration is the first stage of migration, this research draws on a survey of undergraduate university students from two campuses in Ghana (n=467) and reveals that most of the students aspire to migrate, mostly for educational reasons. However, many of these students also aspire to return, others to live transnational lives, and one in twelve students surveyed are not interested in migrating—that is, in leaving Ghana for more than one year. These results show that university students in Ghana often imagine their future at home, but their life strategies include graduate school and gaining work experience abroad. Hence, mobility, but perhaps not necessarily migration, is a central feature of their life aspirations. Keywords:Global South, student migration, mobility, knowledge society, aspiration.

Understanding Collaborative Problem-Solving on the Move: A Design Science Research Journey

Abstract The emergence of globally distributed teams and the evolution of mobile technologies have increased the number of mobile knowledge workers (MKW). MKW are professionals who frequently work on the move, far from a fixed workplace, performing knowledge-intensive activities. MKW often work alone, which leads them to face constant challenges in their work practices and difficulties to get timely knowledge to solve their problems alone. Still, little is known about how the collaborative problem-solving is carried out in the MKW’s context. To address this gap, we adopted the Design Science Research (DSR) as a research method, and we applied activity theory (AT) and expansive learning as theoretical foundations to understand the MKW’s context. We created an artifact - a method implemented via a mobile app - to support collaborative problem-solving processes on the move, which allowed us to understand better how these processes occur, contributing not only to problems resolutions but also to organizational learning.

From walls to experience – servitization of workplaces

PurposeNew ways of working challenge workplace management: increasing mobility and diminishing organizational boundaries require re-evaluation of both workplace design and service delivery. However, structures and processes of workplace management are still traditional, and managers, together with outsourced facility service providers, often do not succeed at fulfilling the needs of mobile employees. The aforementioned changes stimulate discussions in many areas in both industry and academy. Nevertheless, workplace literature from business perspective seems to be scarce. In this paper, the focus is on workplace service offering for mobile knowledge workers. This paper aims to study the current state of workplace servitization. To answer this, the authors identify value offering elements that are used in office business market to deliver workplace as a service.Design/methodology/approachThis study follows multiple case study methodology including five case studies. Primary data were collected through interviews with workplace service providers. Secondary data included observations and publicly available data. The authors took business model design approach to study selected business offerings.FindingsThe results indicate that workplace business models include elements of servitization on various levels. Physical space is no longer the central offering in the office business; instead, it acts as a component on which the service portfolio is built. The highest value from workplace comes from experience-related service offerings.Originality/valueAcademically, research contributes to the workplace management studies by providing servitization perspective to a topic previously approached with a more technical and psychological point of view. This study can also support service providers and customer organizations in their quest to make service provision more flexible and experience-oriented.

Agency, sociomateriality, and configuration work

ABSTRACTSocial informatics research offers insights into the relationship between information technologies and social contexts. However, the material roles of information technologies, and their interplay with the agentic work of social actors, have not been addressed. Drawing on a field study of 37 mobile knowledge workers, we examine the dual material roles (enabling and constraining) played by information technologies in their work practices. We also investigate how these workers exert agency by fashioning multiple information technologies into a functioning digital assemblage. Although information technologies provide consequential affordances that enable mobilization of work across spaces and times, they simultaneously present design-driven, local, organizational, and temporal technological constraints that require mobile knowledge workers to engage in “configuration work” to make information technologies function effectively. Building on a sociomaterial perspective, we further discuss the interplay of information technologies and work practices enacted by mobile knowledge workers, in which both human and technological agency are materialized.

‘Knowledge Workers’ in the Baltic Sea Region: Comparative Assessment of Innovative Performance of the Countries in the Macro-Region

AbstractThe article studies the problems of human resources stemming from increased mobility, and the emergence of new aspects of migration processes. A comparative analysis of the connection between academic development in the context of university (and the science system) and the process of labour migration taking place in Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia was carried out. The article examines the limits of the model through European territorial migration process and concludes that the huge migration of high-skilled labour (called the “knowledge workers”) has had a very negative impact on the innovative and academic potential of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and a negative impact in Estonia. In the final section, the article examines increase in the requirements for competence in the Baltic Sea macroregion of the European Union and Estonia’s university reform of 2013-2016 as an illustrative experiment to (un)resolved problems. The first results of the reform in higher education indicated that it was ineffective-for students, the good ideas of the reform proved to be a lost experiment and the mobility of knowledge workers, as the future academic resource in homeland, turned from Estonia to larger Europe, especially to Finland and the UK.

Trade Secrets Protection and Antitakeover Provisions

How do firms protect their human capital? We test whether firms facing an increased threat of being acquired strengthen their antitakeover provisions (ATPs) in order to bond with their employees. We use the adoption of the Inevitable Disclosure Doctrine (IDD) by US state courts, which exogenously decreases knowledge-worker mobility, thus elevating takeover risk and reducing employee incentives to innovate. Firms respond to IDD adoption by strengthening ATPs that defend against hostile takeovers, especially when they have greater ex-ante employee mobility and human capital and place greater importance on employee relations. We find no evidence that managers strengthen ATPs for entrenchment or takeover bargaining purposes in this setting. Our findings show that ATPs can be used to credibly commit to employees in order to protect long-term value creation.

COWORKING – ŚRODOWISKO PRACY WSPIERAJĄCE MOBILNYCH PRACOWNIKÓW WIEDZY

COWORKING – ŚRODOWISKO PRACY WSPIERAJĄCE MOBILNYCH PRACOWNIKÓW WIEDZY

Knowledge Worker Mobility in Context: Pushing the Boundaries of Theory and Methods

AbstractScholars are paying more attention to knowledge workers (KW) as they gain importance in the knowledge‐based economy. Knowledge worker mobility (KWM) can involve various forms of employee and entrepreneurial movements: the transfer of employees from one organization to another either through locational movement or through a change in ownership, the transfer of employees within the same organization but in different units and/or geographies, and the spinning off by employees into new ventures. KWM spans a variety of different contexts which have rarely been explored in prior research. We focus on advancing our understanding of KWM in context, pushing the boundaries of theory and methods by developing a framework focusing on five main contextual dimensions: organizational context and roles, geographical and spatial context, social context and teams, institutional and cultural norms, and temporal dynamics. We summarize the papers presented in the special issue and also identify an agenda for further research.

The knowledge spillover theory of intrapreneurship

Introducing the Knowledge Spillover Theory of Intrapreneurship, we examine how labour mobility impacts innovation distributed by firm size. A matched employer-employee dataset, pooled with firm-level patent application data, is implemented in the analysis. We provide new evidence that knowledge workers’ mobility has a positive and strongly significant impact on all firms’ innovation output, measured as patent applications. The patterns and effects do however differ between large and small firms. More precisely, for small firms, intraregional mobility of knowledge workers who have previously worked in a patenting firm (the learning-by-hiring effect) is shown to be statistically and economically highly significant, whereas only limited impact could be detected for firms losing knowledge workers (the learning-by-diaspora effect).

Cross-Organization Collaboration and Mobility of Knowledge Workers

Through the lens of labor market friction logic, we theorize that knowledge workers’ experiences on cross-organization teams affect employee mobility patterns and shape post-mobility employee performance. Additionally, we theorize that employee ability positively moderates both these relationships. We test our theory in the context of academic scientists because these knowledge workers may be part of collaborations both within their current organization and across multiple organizations. We find that cross-organization collaboration enhances knowledge worker mobility and moving to collaborators is associated with greater post-mobility employee performance. We find that employee ability positively moderates the effect of moving to collaborators. The results suggest that cross-organization collaboration reduces labor market frictions and enhances the quality of employee-employer matches, particularly for high ability individuals.

Mobile knowledge workers and traditional mobile workers: Assessing the prevalence of multi-locational work in Europe.

This article contributes to the discussion on flexible working by assessing empirically the prevalence of mobile, multi-locational work in Europe (EU-28, Norway and Switzerland). Drawing on data from the Sixth European Working Conditions Survey, the prevalence of multi-locational work across Europe is examined in terms of the knowledge intensity of the work. Knowledge-intensive occupations are characterised by a high level of individual skills, typically acquired through tertiary-level education, and a high degree of autonomy combined with frequent use of ICT. According to the results, working on mobile sites – a practice that augments working in the primary workplace – is most common in northern European countries, where the proportion of knowledge-intensive occupations is high. However, even in the Nordic region, knowledge workers predominantly work at their employers’ premises. This finding is in marked contrast with the hyperbole and expectations which assume that ICT allows knowledge workers to work free from the constraints of time and space. Agriculture, construction and transport workers still represent the largest proportion of the mobile workforce. Knowledge-intensive job features, however, predict the adoption of working at home. The analysis adds to the literature on flexible working by taking into account both traditional and knowledge-intensive forms of multi-locational work as well as providing a cross-national comparison.