Mobile work, mobility, and mobile devices: Responding to a societal shift

Abstract

The global community of mobile communication scholars has accomplished much in the past 10 years. We have more precisely defined mobile communication scholarship and began to focus on spatial, temporal, and power dynamics surrounding mobility and mobile devices (e.g., Campbell, 2013; Frith & Özkul, 2019; Stephens, 2018). Our scholarship has led the way by publishing research on diverse types of work and workers around the globe (e.g., construction workers: Pink et al., 2014; janitorial staff: Stephens & Ford, 2016; livestock farmers: Vidal-González & Fernández-Piqueras, 2021). Now, in a world that has recently experienced multiple cascading disasters, including a global pandemic, mobile communication has become even more important, and in the next five years we have new occasions to contribute our theoretical and empirical research. Before the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in the US, 7% of the population were considered full-time mobile workers—worked outside a designated work location—so mobile work is not a new practice (Parker et al., 2020). Scholars in a host of fields have studied telework, virtual work, and the use of mobile technologies in organizations (e.g., Watson-Manheim et al., 2002). What is different is that during 2020, we experienced extreme growth as the percentage of people working outside a formal workplace full time jumped from 7% to 50% (Parker et al., 2020). With that shift came a host of new challenges: parents could not find childcare outside the home, care responsibilities more often fell on women, people were less mobile as travel came to a halt, and many people having to work from home did not have a dedicated place to do their job