The new wave of 'hybrid' work: An opportunity to revise assumptions and build theory

The motivation for this special issue lies in the recent resurgence of interest in and the accelerated adoption of hybrid work practices against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result of enforced lockdown policies, hybrid work emerged as a ‘new form of work’, whereby work arrangements began integrating physical workspace and time with their virtual counterparts to maintain business continuity. Hybrid work can be understood as a form of work that blends traditional office-based work with remotely located alternatives (Gratton, 2021). Earlier work on hybridity in the workplace conceptualised hybridity as combining three kinds of space: physical office-based space, home-based domestic space and virtual online cyberspace (Halford, 2005). The dynamics of the social relations and spatial arrangements that co-exist and co-evolve in such spaces have been variously explored in the literature, especially in homeworking and teleworking (Baruch, 2001; Felstead & Jewson, 2000; Gurstein, 2001). However, the unique situations that such a confluence affords, for example forms of work that simultaneously accommodate and shape these new organisational spaces, have not yet been explored. Indeed, recent practices, particularly during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, indicated that it is not merely the spatial dimension that bears significance over where and how hybrid work is undertaken and organised, but that the temporal dimension is crucially important as well (Gratton, 2021). Further, recent scholarship indicates that hybrid work goes beyond the confluence of space and time, but rather fuses these dimensions together to create new workspaces (Chamakiotis et al., 2023). New forms of work are seen to offer perspectives on the temporo-spatial re-organisation of work and have tended to foreground mostly social and organisational processes involved in these work modalities, for example work/life balance, the dissolution of boundaries between the personal and the professional, expanding of working time, invasion of personal space by the domination of work activities (Ellison, 2004; Nansen et al., 2010; Wapshott & Mallett, 2012). According to de Vaujany et al. (2021), however, these temporo-spatial perspectives have fundamentally changed the nature of work, ‘We just share some frontiers and liminalities in the new worlds of work. We cross them but we do not occupy them anymore. Digitality is the very large enabler and mediation of these dyschronies. And the Covid-19 crisis has made more visible and more present this process of “liminalization”. Work is not a grounded time-space unity any more, a heavy production tool or IT artefacts. It is an ephemeral and precarious connective activity that can take place everywhere, every time. A mnesic trace potentially meaningful and subject of surveillance processes fed by ourselves. Most of all, it is not fully “work” any more’ (p. 688). Along these lines, hybrid work is seen as a ‘third way’ of working, where physical presence and synchronicity are negotiable; new ways of making those who are absent present and synchronising schedules to suit need to be re-configured (Jacobs, 2021). Some of the present thinking focuses on redesigning office space for collaboration, communal working and socialising and home-based space for thinking, working productively and focusing on tasks (Microsoft, 2021). Technology is meant to provide support for these re-configurations, by, for example, ‘enabl[ing] homeworkers to drop in on casual conversations in informal meeting areas by having a videoconferencing camera streaming a kitchen area’ (Jacobs, 2021). Traditionally, research on remote work has tended to ‘black box’ the role played by digital technologies, acknowledging them to be agents of change (Messenger & Gschwind, 2016), or enablers of virtuality (Panteli et al., 2019), but not exploring in any depth the nature and extent of the relationship between the technology and these ways of working (Richardson, 2021), whereby the later become increasingly entangled. Against this background, the call for papers for this Special Issue aimed at inviting novel theorisations and conceptualisations of IS that can reorient our thinking in terms of the intertwined organisational-level and individual-level impacts of hybrid work arrangements and which can further function as analytical tools for the processes and mechanisms through which IS both enable and constrain hybrid work arrangements. We also wished to revisit existing debates around the interconnected themes of time, space, work and technology, to create a new space for exploring in more depth how digital technologies and hybrid working are mutually shaping and influencing each other in moulding these new work modalities. Picking up on the spatiotemporal themes from organisational theorists studying these topics (e.g., Aroles et al., 2019; de Vaujany et al., 2021), we explore the re-spatialisation and re-temporalisation of hybrid work being engendered through digital technologies and we present these two theoretically relevant areas of focus as the basis for further research in hybrid work. Space is understood to be dynamic, dialectical and full of meanings (Lefebvre, 1991). It is not absolute and cannot be independent of social practices. For example, the very same space is perceived and conceived differently by different groups of people (e.g. women/men, adults/children, minority ethnic groups); therefore, it is not possible to assign a single and objective meaning to a space. In this context, space is regarded as a (social) product (Lefebvre, 1991), which is constructed out of social relations (Massey, 1995). While specific social practices can result in a specific organisation of space, the latter can define relationships between people, activities, things and concepts within it. Spatialisation is defined as a process of constructing and creating a space in which social activities and relationships are embodied (Dobritsyna, 2019) and Lefebvre (1991) argues that spatialisation encompasses the dialectical relationship between material spatial practices, representation of space, and space of representation. Material spatial practices (experienced) refer to the spatial movement of physical and material flows to assure (commodity) production and social production. Representation of space (perceived) consists of signs and significations, codes and knowledge that enable the material practices to be ‘talked about’ and described either in everyday common sense and layman's terms or in special jargon used by experts. Space of representation (conceived) refers to the imagination of new meanings or possibilities for spatial practices. Production of space signals the dialectical relationships between these practices. Hybrid work involves at least three spaces: public, private (or remote) and virtual (Halford, 2005). Public space refers to centralised office; private space refers to one's personal work environment; and virtual space refers to computer-generated cyberspace. In the context of hybrid work, the office is valued as a performative space where socialisation and office activities take place and formal working rhythms are defined; virtual space is valued as a space where signs, symbols, images and discourses are produced and exchanged. The hybrid workspace is an integrative space, which fuses public, private and virtual spaces into one entity to enable frictionless spatial movement of people, activities and material flows. As such, hybrid work entails the re-spatialisation of traditional workplaces and domestic spaces (Halford, 2005). The re-spatialisation of domestic spaces essentially requires hybrid workers and co-residents in the same household to re-examine their experience, perception and conception of ‘home’, and subsequently to re-configure the spatial organisation of the household. Spatial arrangements, social relations and social practices within households are transformed because of the introduction of economic activities previously performed in the public domain into the private space. At the same time, the traditional workplace is also re-spatialised because hybrid work requires both workers and employers to re-examine their experience, perception and conception of office spaces to construct a new workspace that reflects the new hybrid work arrangements and embodies new social practices. ‘[T]he question of time remains open, riddled with paradox and infinitely arguable’ (Grant et al., 2015, p. 3). Indeed, there are multiple and diverse conceptualisations of time, that range from exclusively objectivist approaches to entirely subjective theorisations, and studies tend to adopt different perspectives, depending on the investigated phenomenon, the disciplinary positioning as well as ontological concerns. Focusing exclusively on work-related studies, the question of time has been examined through the impact and nature of travel time (e.g., time spent on commuting) (Bonsall & Shires, 2006), through the temporal displacement of start/finish work time (Lyons & Haddad, 2008), and through practice-based perspectives that focus on what workers do while at work (Im et al., 2005). Several of these studies have specifically explored and drawn attention to technologies and systems as temporal structures that influence personal/professional boundaries and organise the rhythm and cycles of work practices (Lee & Liebenau, 2000; Oborn & Barrett, 2021; Orlikowski & Yates, 2002). If time is to be broadly understood as the ‘sociocultural time of multiple dimensions (sequencing, timing, past-present-future relations, etc.)’ (Munn, 1992, p. 116), then workers must be exposed to the entire spectrum of these dimensions as well as the realities experienced in their practice, as they become entangled in polychronicities (Ettema & Verschuren, 2007) and liminal spaces (Chamakiotis et al., 2023; Dorow & Jean, 2021), and where time takes both subjective and objective forms (Holt & Johnsen, 2019). Indeed, earlier studies have argued for understanding time and temporality as having a dual nature (Johnsen et al., 2019), a notion particularly prevalent in Bourdieu's writings and Theunissen's existentialist perspective of time. In detail, while Bourdieu has not directly theorised around time, his work suggests that the present is understood and experienced through interconnected events, but also as being independent of these, where time proceeds externally to them (Adkins, 2011). In this sense, ‘the future is always already present in the immediate present because agents are ordinarily immersed in the forthcoming or, more precisely, agents practically and pre-reflexively anticipate the forthcoming as a routine part of action’ (Adkins, 2011, p. 352). In a similar vein, for Theunissen, the future is always expected and the way we experience and understand it depends on what or how the future could be based on our past and present (Theunissen, 1986). Bringing the above within the context of work, and hybrid work in particular, scholars have argued that research needs to explore alternative theorisations of time and the re-temporalisation of work practices (Kunisch et al., 2021). de Vaujany et al. (2021), for example, suggest that work is organised and experienced along the continuum of time and that because of this, we need to pay attention to the multiple, shared, individual and conflicting temporalities, and how these might be influencing and shaping paradoxical relationships between workers and the organisation as far as autonomy, power and control are concerned. Indeed, it is not merely about identifying relevant measures of performance management and productivity as workers move further away from the physical boundaries of the organisation, but also addressing questions that relate to how workers experience multiple temporalities, for example when they have to organise working from home for some days of the week, and where other responsibilities, such as caring for others, impose themselves on to the worker, requiring attention and often being in conflict with work requirements (Hubers et al., 2018). While some temporal events may be urgent, others may be seen as susceptible to rescheduling or postponement. Occasionally the ability to temporally fragment larger activities across the working week can support flexibility, especially if/when workers can alternate work with personal matters (Hubers et al., 2018). Equally, however, this may result in ‘dead’ times, whereby workers remain idle, waiting for something to happen on the other end of an organisational process, as well as potential intersectional impacts (Burchell et al., 2021), as caring responsibilities (e.g., school runs), which are often gendered, are rigid (Dijst, 2004). In attempting to understand the nature of the relationship between digital technologies and the spatiotemporal configuration of new work practices, work on new work modalities (mostly remote and telework) has tended to borrow concepts from the Science and Technology Studies literature, for example, to discuss how technology mediates spatiotemporal arrangements in new home-based environments (Nansen et al., 2010) and new work-based spatial arrangements (Kingma, 2019). Emphasis has been placed on how technologies mediate the experience of new ways of working, both actively through their shaping of new work modalities, and passively as unintended consequences of their use and appropriation. A strong practice theory-based research stream has also oriented some of this research drawing on sociomateriality as a theoretical lens (Endrissat & Leclercq-Vandelannoitte, 2021). Proponents of computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) studies also see a role for further research into technology mediation especially new digital tools et al., 2021), and some studies on the and for in this space & and technology also offer for some of this work et al., and have been in the relationship between technology and these new work modalities. For example, technology and paradoxical relationship with new ways of working have been in studies about how digital technologies create situations for workers where both and and are simultaneously experienced Vaujany et al., 2021; et al., & & 2018). We however, that space and time need to be more and particularly in of the COVID-19 that made the of time, space and technologies more argues that the is an space that is both produced by and of to working In this sense, of technologies in their and spaces of and the or of technologies and their social role in the context of hybrid work can provide into and to three spaces (e.g., personal and virtual online and social relations within these spaces, organisation of work and of of technology in the re-spatialisation of work is the of the re-spatialisation of work cannot happen the support of technology (Lefebvre, 1991), technologies are not and cannot be tools as they become a of power and and actively in re-spatialisation of work at the same time they are used as tools to and of the dialectical relationship between technologies and spaces into the of new forms of workplace and work. While re-temporalisation cannot be from the spatial dimension of work, we in the re-temporalisation of work, we need to the role of technologies, It is well that technology the boundaries between work and personal by making these and in about and & At the same time, digital technology new of time and temporalities, where the present and from (Adkins, in that have not been explored as by the existing (Holt & Johnsen, 2019), especially within the context of new work modalities & 2023). Technology mediates work, work and of with others within the context of our and requires to of the future as always expected but as personal time is by work time and the needs of the present 2021). In this of the present and time may be as It is in this context that digital technologies may mediate and in become the for (Johnsen et al., 2019). In this areas further as far as of hybrid work and the role of digital technologies are concerned. For example, as part of hybrid work, technology may mediate that are to productivity and & where the technology potential hybrid working by a rhythm for work and production that not workers are the of hybrid work may further time to the digital that enable hybrid working and out any potential is the role of digital technologies and particularly how their may support workers to hybrid working arrangements and work with the organisation and their along the time as well as how such arrangements may influence the of other activities when work and personal during the Hybrid working and work, organisation and management 2019; 2005). The consequences of re-spatialisation and re-temporalisation of work, organisation and management the of the individual in when and where to work et al., of when and where work is and of social relationships between (Halford, & and between the individual and et al., in the of power and in organisational power both to and control and surveillance of individual workers Vaujany et al., 2021). 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