The coming of the post-digital workplace? A survey of how white-collar workers experience and cope with digital media reliance

The coming of the post-digital workplace? A survey of how white-collar workers experience and cope with digital media reliance. New media technology can both hamper and amplify workers' agency. Much research shows that the ambiguities of digital reliance are accentuated among office workers, especially knowledge workers, who spend most of their working time handling different types of information and data. Thus, in times of constant connectivity, people might feel compelled to create time-spaces for disconnection, or find spatial and temporal routines for restricting their use of digital tools. This article provides a quantitative analysis, based on a survey, of how private and public officials (“white-collar workers”) in Sweden experience and handle digital media reliance at work, with a special focus on whether they think communicative and territorial agency are enhanced or constrained under digitalized working conditions. Based on a principal component analysis (PCA), five dispositions toward (the handling of) digital media reliance are identified: the skepctical, the embracing, the captivated, the reluctant and the disciplined. These dispositions are further analyzed in relation to demographic and contextual variables, pointing especially to the significance of employment sector. While digital media reliance is appreciated and associated with extended agency by many informants, the study also reveals different facets of post-digital sentiments and tactics. These are particularly constitutive of the skeptical disposition, reflecting inclinations to avoid certain media and find alternatives to digital tools, but also in the disciplined disposition which encompasses internalized routines for media use. The study also shows that the normalization of digitalized work processes is entwined with, and necessitates, different forms of territorial micro-politics extending beyond the workplace per se. • White-collar workers report mainly positive consequences of digital reliance. • There are five different dispositions to digital media reliance at work. • Post-digital work-practices are associated with digital skepticism and self-discipline. • Reactions to digital reliance can be found within and beyond the workplace. • The mediatization of work is a complex, dialectical, process.