2C-NOW²: Hybrid Workgroups and Workspaces

2C-NOW²

2C-NOW2 builds on the concepts, methods, and findings achieved in 2C-NOW Phase One to extend our existing trace analytics work by developing novel methods for conducting trace ethnographies and analysing rich contextual data from workplace studies. Together, these methods are used to provide empirical evidence and insights into how new arrangements for hybrid work are transforming working worlds and to enable rich contextual analyses of hybrid workgroups and emerging coordinative practices.

In 2C-NOW Phase 2, we extend and deepen our existing research findings in two main directions. First, we build on our trace analytics work to extend our methodological toolkit through the design of trace ethnographic methods and tools. Second, we develop in-depth empirical studies of recent transformations to work routines and work practices arising from the growth in hybrid work and hybrid workgroups in organisations. Together, these provide both empirical evidence and insights into how new arrangements for hybrid work are transforming working worlds and enable rich contextual analyses of hybrid workgroups and emerging coordinative practices.

Our goals are to:

develop and apply digital ethnographic methods to provide rich contextual analyses of the rhythms and flows of everyday work in hybrid and distributed work settings,
analyse and understand emerging sequences of coordination work to identify emerging work routines and patterns of interaction in hybrid and distributed workgroups, and
to examine the ways that technologies and artefacts are mobilised in the design of digital workspaces.

Innovative digital ethnographic methods in the form of digital hybrid work diaries and work visualisation methods will be developed and used to capture, visualise and analyse new forms of rich, longitudinal data about the everyday rhythms and work routines of distributed and hybrid workgroups.

In the context of the overarching framework of the Priority Programme SPP2267 our work contributes to understandings at the micro- and meso-levels of activity examining transformations to technologies, work practices and routines as they arise for individuals, workgroups and organisations. In terms of the three motion dynamics, we address all three dynamics by investigating:

how work practices are being shaped (and are shaping) the use of collaboration technologies to organise and coordinate everyday work (permeating);
how organisations assemble their collaboration platforms and the ways that collaboration technologies are adopted and diffuse across organisations (making available) and
how work practices evolve and whether (or not) they become standardised and embedded as organisational-level work routines (perpetuating).