mobile work practices

Kakihara, M., Sørensen, C. and Wiberg, M.(2002). Fluid Interaction in Mobile Work Practices. 1st Tokyo Mobile Roundtable, Mobile Innovation Research Program, Institute of Innovation Research, Hitotsubashi University. Tokyo, Japan. 30th-31st May:

"This is clearly the world of the contemporary mobile work mode. Mobile workers engage themselves in getting their job done not only at their formal offices but at various sites such as home, clients’ offices, hotels, moving vehicles and so on. Looking at their nature of work, there is no rigid boundary that determines whether inside or outside the office: anywhere can be their office. They permeate across “regions” and “networks.” In this sense, we can argue that mobile work is the fluid mode of working."

mobility concept

Kakihara, M. and Sørensen, C. (2001). Expanding the 'mobility' concept. SIGGROUP Bull. 22, 3 (Dec. 2001), pp. 33-37:

"The train and airline infrastructures are highly integrated with ICTs such as electronic reservation systems and traffic control systems. It is therefore important to recognize that the fundamental nature of technological revolution in the late twentieth century is the dynamic and complex interplay between old and new technologies and between the reconfiguration of the technological fabric and its domestication (...).This paper concerns the concept of mobility, which manifests such a transformation of our social lives combining new and old technologies. It is now widely argued that our life styles have become increasingly mobile in the sense that the speed of transportation and hence geographical reach within a given time span is dramatically augmented by modern technological developments and sophistication such as train and airplane systems."

mobility as duality: fluidity & stability

"(...) we proposed setting an integrative approach that sees mobility as a duality and thus facilitate the practice of theorisation on mobility; namely, studying both fluidity and stability in contemporary society and work organizations and understanding their mutual influences. The next step will be to test our arguments in various real-world contexts. We believe that field studies with rich and contextualized data on the actualities of mobile devices’ usage and on the kind of mobility we engage in are essential to fertilize this embryonic research field." Pica, Daniele & Kakihara, Masao (2003). The duality of mobility: understanding fluid organizations and stable interaction. ECIS 2003. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

mobile professional work

Kakihara, M. & C. Sørensen (2004). Practicing Mobile Professional Work: Tales of Locational, Operational, and Interactional Mobility. INFO: The Journal of Policy, Regulation and Strategy for Telecommunication, Information and Media, vol. 6(3), pp: 180-187:

"The results of the fieldwork in Tokyo clearly demonstrate that the conventional understanding of mobility, rigidly confined to geographic aspects, does not suffice for grasping the diverse realities of dynamic work practices of contemporary professional workers, in particular mobile professionals. Their work practices exhibit not only an extensive geographical movement in daily work activities but also intense interaction with a wide range of people through both physical and virtual interaction means. They also show flexible operation as an independent unit of business that can be flexibly mobilized by the firms."

Ver tabela 2, página 7. Não tenho acesso à revista. O artigo que aqui disponibilizo faz parte dos arquivos do author.

emerging work practices of mobile professionals

Masao Kakihara (2003). Emerging Work Practices of ICT-Enabled Mobile Professionals. PhD thesis submited to the Department of Information Systems, London School of Economics and Political Science, University of London.

"This thesis aims to offer a theoretical foundation for the concept of mobility, particularly in contemporary work contexts. With support of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in general and mobile technology in particular, contemporary work activities are increasingly distributed and dynamically conducted in various locations. In such an emerging work environment, maintaining a highly level of ‘mobility’ is becoming critical for contemporary workers, particularly for mobile professionals. Based on the theoretical considerations on the concept of mobility, this thesis empirically explores the dynamic and heterogeneous nature of mobile professionals’ work practices.

(...)

The mode of mobility is characterised not only by extensive geographical movement but also by operational flexibility and intense interaction in mobile professionals’ dynamic work activities. Based on these theoretical and empirical discussions, this thesis aims: 1) to theoretically underpin our understanding of mobility in contemporary work contexts; 2) to offer empirically grounded implications for the post-bureaucratic, fluid organising of work; and finally 3) to advance the ongoing debate on the dynamic interplay of work, organisation, and technology."