This research advances the understanding of the ways in which mobile knowledge professionals (MKP) work. They have specific, typically rare, expertise. They come from underrepresented backgrounds and participate in knowledge-driven labor markets.
Mobile workers are not tied to a single employer or location. They can work for multiple clients and can partner with other mobile workers. Some workers have routine circuits of travel while others are more nomadic. Regardless of the degree of travel mobile knowledge workers must organize and reconfigure their work spaces. These “mobile offices” are about creating a physical space for cognitive work that also has the ability for digital engagement. Digital technologies are the mediator of most work practices.
A mobile knowledge worker’s success requires sophisticated social and technical acumen to efficiently and accurately leverage digital and organization resources. Their numbers and importance will continue to be fueled by (1) the growing availability of powerful mobile devices; (2) increased access to digital resources enabled by the ubiquity of broadband networks; (3) changes in work, especially the necessary distribution of expertise costs across multiple firms; and (4) the prominence of knowledge work in economic production.
Based on previous work we see that mobile workers livelihood is based on having a substantial amount of professional and social capital. These resources are often relative to socio-economic measures such as age, gender, ethnicity and educational background. If this is true the ‘gig’, or contract-based economy, being touted by many as an important part of the expanding knowledge economy, is potentially difficult for those who have different characteristics from the typically younger, whiter, and well-educated participants that are found in the co-working spaces.
The data collection will focus on the ways in which these citizens and residents create digital collections and pursue their did work. Specifically, how do these workers draw together and leverage the collection of digital resource to pursue this work.
The study has two primary goals: 1) to develop a set of linked studies to document, categorize and analyse the practices of a diverse set of MKP’s relative to the variations and commonalities in their work practices; 2) to produce a survey of MKP’s uses of technological infrastructures to determine which tools, applications, systems, and related infrastructural elements are most used, least used, and, ultimately, most important to their work.
The study will assist in revealing how future knowledge workers can be trained with necessary organizational and infrastructure competencies and designers can build knowledge infrastructures with aligned features and robustness. This research stands to advance the theorization of mobile knowledge work an cyberinfrastructure while simultaneously enabling the development of novel data collection methods and archival standards.
This research is funded by Social and Economic Sciences Unit of the United States National Science Foundation. The findings and insights do not reflect the opinion or position of the NSF.