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Digital Working Spaces. New Geographies Evolving Shaped By Digitalization and Virtualization of Work.
Digital Working Spaces. New Geographies Evolving Shaped By Digitalization and Virtualization of Work.
Tuesday, 12 July 2016: 09:00-10:30
Location: Hörsaal 23 (Main Building)
RC30 Sociology of Work (host committee) Language: English
In the late 1980s during the “spatial turn” a new constellation between time and space with the term “time-space compression” (Harvey, 1989) or “time-space distanciation” (Giddens, 1981) has been discussed. The use of modern information and communication technologies enabled decades later a completely new dimension of “time-space compression” as presented for example in Thomas Friedman’s entertaining bestseller “The world is flat” (but not dissatisfying in terms of scientific approaches). Nonetheless the debate about new spatial and temporal fixes promoted the differentiation between space and place, emphasizing that the changes go beyond new geographical orders.
With reference to work, new spatial arrangements are evolving. This development has been accelerated by the computerisation during the 1980s and 1990s, but digitalisation and a worldwide ICT infrastructure formed the basis for new spatial dimensions of informatisation leading to a proceeding digitalisation of working processes, means and products. A new division of labour shows up in terms of outsourcing, near- and offshoring as well as crowdsourcing and cloud working ambitions. Work is organised as flexible and somehow delocalised through the ICT-enabled possibility space. As a consequence of the distributed work organisation the need to cooperate is increasing at the same time as physical mobility.
The aim of this session is to get a closer look on current developments driven by digitalisation and virtualisation of work, localisation and re-localisation as well as their consequences for people working.
Session Organizers: