Mobile Work, Mobile Lives

With the ever-increasing functionalities of information and communication technologies, as well as the spatial and temporal transformations brought about by shifts in global work patterns, mobile work has become more important than ever to workers and employers. The objective of this volume is to illustrate through narratives the patterns of mobility that are altering the meaning of work and how work is positioned with respect to the rest of life. The contributors to this volume are anthropologists who not only study remote, nomadic, and mobile workers but who are also remote, nomadic, and mobile themselves. They share observations about the evolution of their personal and professional identities, their attempts to define or merge boundaries between work and personal life, and their struggles to present the value of their work to others. Their descriptions of the tensions inherent in mobile life and work, and the strategies they employ to overcome them, greatly further our understanding of the interplay of self, work, place, and technology, and point to future research directions for the anthropology of work.

Auteur

Tracy L.Meerwarth has worked as an anthropologist and
contract researcher at General Motors Research and Development (GM
R and D) since 2001. She graduated with an M.A. in applied
anthropology from Northern Arizona University with an emphasis in
organizational anthropology. She and her team at GM R and D have
published articles in scholarly journals such as Human
Organization, Journal of Manufacturing Management, and Space and
Culture. Meerwarth has presented at numerous annual conferences
including the American Anthropological Association, Society for
Applied Anthropology (SfAA), and the Ethnographic Praxis in
Industry Conference (EPIC). She has applied her interest in
cultural modeling, cognitive, and symbolic anthropology to various
projects at GM, including collaboration, space, and architecture.
In 2007, she and her team at GM R and D filed a patent entitled
"System and Model for Performance Value Based Collaborative
Relationships," and received a U.S. Copyright
Registration entitled "Collaboration Tools for Designing and
Implementing an Ideal Manufacturing Culture in the U.S."
Meerwarth is also a competitive golfer, yogi, and triathlete.

Julia Gluesing is a business and organizational
anthropologist and research professor in industrial and
manufacturing engineering at Wayne State University, specializing
in global teaming and global product development. She is currently
principal investigator of an NSF grant to study the diffusion of
innovation across the global enterprise by tapping into an
organization's information technology infrastructure. With
more than 25 years of industry experience, Gluesing also frequently
serves as a consultant and trainer to help business teams develop
strategies and skills for working globally. She conducts research
in global work practices and in cross-cultural and organizational
communication for companies such as Ford Motor Company, Nissan
Motor Corporation, Aegon, EDS Corporation, and Sun Microsystems.
She has published professionally, most recently as a contributing
author in Virtual Teams that Work: Creating Conditions for Virtual
Team Effectiveness, Handbook of Managing Global Complexity, and
Crossing Cultures: Lessons from Master Teachers. Gluesing received
her M.A. (1985) from Michigan State University in organizational
communication and her Ph.D. (1995) in cultural anthropology from
Wayne State University.

Brigitte Jordan trained as a medical anthropologist
(Ph.D., University of California, Irvine). Jordan has carried out
ethnographic research for more than 30 years in academic and
corporate settings, most recently as a principal scientist at Xerox
PARC (now the Palo Alto Research Center). A freelance consultant,
Jordan's research and consulting interests revolve around new
"lifescapes" she sees emerging in a globalizing world
under the impact of new communication and information technologies.
Her special interests and expertise lie in the adaptation of
ethnographic methods to physical, virtual, and hybrid ecologies.
She is particularly concerned with the evolution and design of
learning and knowledge ecologies that support productive work
settings in the society of the future.

Contenu

Introduction: Tracking the Context of Mobile Lives (Tracy L.
Meerwarth, Julia C. Gluesing, and Brigitte Jordan).

Community, Context, and the Presentation of Self in Distributed
Workplace Interaction (Michael Youngblood).

Living a Distributed Life: Multilocality and Working at a
Distance (Brigitte Jordan).

Occupational Websites as Locations for Remote and Mobile Worker
Culture:An Examination of Temporary Worker Websites (Loril M.
Gossett).

Identity in a Virtual World: The Coevolution of Technology,
Work, and Lifecycle (Julia C. Gluesing).

Remote or Mobile Work as an Occasion for (Re)Structuring
Professional and Personal Identities (Perri Strawn).

Disentangling Patterns of a Nomadic Life (Tracy L.
Meerwarth).

Located Mobility: Living and Working in Multiple Places (Amy
Goldmacher).

Interruptions and Intertasking in Distributed Knowledge Work
(Patricia G. Lange).

Conclusion: Patterns of Mobile Work and Life (Julia C. Gluesing,
Tracy L. Meerwarth, and Brigitte Jordan).

Biosketches of Authors.