Hanging on the Mobile Phone: Experiencing Work and Spatial Flexibility

By Dr. Diannah Lowry & Megan Moskos

The role of technology and flexibility in work and employment has sparked much debate, with optimistic accounts on the one hand and with more negative views on the other.

Technology however is of course not homogenous in its uses or in its impacts. While work technologies such as the internet and email have been critically studied, the way(s) in which the mobile phone may shape work and workers' experiences has largely avoided scholarly attention. Indeed, there appears to be a tendency to ignore the impact of mobile technologies on the 'unspectacular' or pedestrian aspects of every day life, including everyday work-life. Three key questions guided this enquiry:

First, how may the work mobile phone, as a communication tool which potentially minimises time constraints to overcome organisational spatial constraints, shape the way work is organised and performed?

Secondly, how may the mobile phone shape the experience of work?

Thirdly, how does the mobile phone shape the boundaries between public (work) and private domain, and how are these boundaries negotiated?

Against this backdrop of questions, and drawing on the work of Gidden's (1991), we aimed to also explore the role of work mobile phones in the construction of a sense of ontological security through the routinised narrative afforded through mobile communication. In other words, we aimed to unmask the way events in the external world of the organization were sorted into an ongoing story of the self, via the communication technology of the mobile phone and how this sense of self may differ in the work and non-work domain. This study involved in depth interviews with 20 workers from different occupational and organisational settings. A consistent theme in each narrative was the notion of the work mobile phone as a 'double-edged' sword, a sword which served to define and bind identity through the continuity of spatial networks, but which also evoked identity anxiety by invasion into the private domain.