mobile.migrant.communities How professionals migrate from one work environment to another ?

"I am an anthropologist by training. I have worked in Europe, the United States, and a number of developing countries, tracing the influence of social and technological innovations on work practice, quality of life and organizational change. For the last 15 years or so, with my colleagues at XEROX Parc and the Institute for Research on Learning, I've studied how people learn at work as they take on new technologies, new organizational structures, new management ideas and incorporate them into their working lives. As applied anthropologists and system designers, we used to go into a workplace and observe the local culture, its formal and informal aspects, what people say as well as what they do. We called those studies "workscapes studies" because we came out to understand that work is not simply a set of specified tasks to be carried out as instructed, but much more like an arena, a territory that needs to be traversed and explored, with well-trodden paths and unknown caves ; with teams to be formed and mountains to be scaled. Like landscapes, workscapes have histories and are constantly exposed to the force of the elements, to seasonal fluctuations, and to human actions. We studied how these workscapes cahnges by spending time with people in their worksplaces, as attentive observers and inquisitive participants.

But then something strange happened. The workplace went away.  Managers were not to be found in their corner office. Employees were somewhere other than the sales pit or the team meeting room. At the same time, jobs were going away. Corporate hierarchies became flatter. Workers all of a sudden needed to make decisions on their own rather than following orders from above. (...) While jobs were going away, there was plenty of work to be done. People in the US, and especially in fast-paced Silicon Valley, worked more hours than ever before. As a matter of fact, the boundaries between what is work and what is home life are blurring for many people. If you read email before your morning shower, send a fax before going to work, and get pages during your vacation for an urgent customer problem, where is the boundary ? It became clear that if we wanted to understand how people learn, change and adjust to the new technology-rich world, we would want to go beyond the evanescent workplace." 

From Brigitte Jordan, from PARC and IRL. 

With increasing technologization and increase of knowledge work, it has finally become possible to divorce much work from the workplace, be that of a factory floor, an office or an on-site meeting room. People now work at home, at secondary workplaces, in the car, in trains, in airplanes, on vacation, in coffee shops and shared working spaces. However they still can not work anytime, anywhere. Working requires a specific working environment, including (not exhaustively) space, data, social relationships, technological ressources, mood and also most importantly comfort with food and bevarages, music, and a sufficiently safe and inspiring atmosphere. What makes an environment a working environment? What are these working environments made off ? How are they actively built and transformed by the practitionners ? How do professionals transform some places (and which) into temporary or regular working environments ?  How do they transit, migrate from one to the other ? How do they anticipate and prepare these transitions ? Which factors regulate these migrations ? In short : what is a modern working environment and how is it actively managed by the professionals ? 

This is the focus of this exploratory ethnographic study into the everyday reality of these mobile professionals. This study is done in partnership with the Master of Design and Ethnography from Dundee University.

This is a fast-paced research project : 4 months, including focus phase, two months of fieldwork, one work of analysis with our partners. The field research is just beginning, we are in the process of building the research protocol. As usual, I realize that formalizing a shared transcript format is an indirect way to discuss and agree on a protocol. More to come on this research anyway...