Technology and the hybrid workplace: the affective living of IT-enabled space

Abstract

Information technology (IT) and space are sociomaterial dimensions of organizations that Human Resource Management (HRM) often take for granted, discounting how workers enact them in practice. With digital technologies rapidly changing the spaces of work, this paper proposes a framework for HRM to appreciate the role of the lived, affective experience of IT-enabled (physical and virtual) hybrid workspaces. We integrate the information systems (IS) literature on sociomaterial practices and insights on organizational space to suggest implications for HRM practice and pathways for future research on how virtual and physical spaces are related and lived in the emergence of new hybrid workplaces and practices.

Keywords:

• Human Resource Management (HRM)
• Information Technology (IT)
• organizational space
• sociomateriality
• IT-enabled space
• affectivity
• physical and virtual space as designed
• physical and virtual space as lived
• hybrid work
• hybrid workspace

Acknowledgments

The first author would like to thank Cegid SA and Esker SA for their support of the Research Chair in Digital Innovation, Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at INSEEC Lyon. Both authors thank the reviewers and the handling editor Prof. Tanya Bondarouk for their constructive support during the revision process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

Data sharing not applicable – no new data generated.

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analyzed in this study.

Notes

1 The approaches differ ontologically, claiming there is no social interaction distinct from materiality (Agential realism), or posing the social context as separate from the materiality in it (Critical realism) (see Leonardi, 2013, p. 74). For an approach that sidesteps these theoretical distinctions to use affordance as a theoretical apparatus to explore the sociomaterial role of IT in organizational practices, see Fayard and Weeks (2014).

2 Lefebvre did address the social tensions of IT. A self-described ‘optimist’ discourse on technology observed ‘Note the growing integration of family life and groups into the life of society and the world… Isn’t what you call daily life going to be absorbed into the intense sociability contained in, and diffused by, communication and information?’, in opposition to a ‘nostalgic’, more critical discourse: ‘For the better? That is far from being proved: at the very least, the disadvantages match the advantages […] careful: rather than uniting people, can’t the media, communications and information technology divide them? Doesn’t it depend on the social and political use made of new techniques? The integration of the private into the social? Do you believe that social life has greatly benefited, been much enriched, since the development of communications?’ (Lefebvre, 2014, pp. 683–684).

A passage of Rhythmanalysis, takes however a clear critical stance against IT and everyday life: ‘Technologies kill immediacy […] The impact of technological conquests does not make the everyday any more alive; it nourishes ideology’ (Lefebvre, 2004, p. 53, emphasis in the original).