Back to listProgram

Sub-theme 30: Organizing Creatively for Hybrid Working

To upload your short paper, please log in to the Member Area.
Convenors:
Gislene Feiten Haubrich
Stockholm School of Economics, Sweden
Stefanie C. Reissner
Durham University, United Kingdom
Marko Orel
Prague University of Economics and Business, Czechia

Call for Papers

Hybrid working, hailed as the ‘future of work’, involves entanglements between where, when, what and how people work while boosting new ways of organizing. It has significant creative potential as social actors ‘assemble’ different aspects of hybrid working and organizing – time, space, artefacts, relationships, boundaries, policies, processes, etc. Yet, exactly what hybrid working is and how it might be done in practice is currently subject to debate and experimentation. This sub-theme seeks to move towards delineating a field of research on hybrid working and organizing by exploring the phenomenon, looking for fruitful theoretical approaches to its conceptualization as well as the inherent methodological opportunities and challenges. We are therefore aiming to connect organization scholars studying different aspects of hybrid working who are interested in developing a better understanding of this pertinent phenomenon and its developments in theory and practice.
 
Since the Covid-19 pandemic, discussions around hybrid working (Aroles et al., 2021) and the advanced technological pervasiveness in our lives (Klein & Watson-Manheim, 2021) have increased. Among different forms of flexible organizing (Izak et al., 2023), hybrid working has been hailed as the “future of work” (Bloom, 2021), combining “the best of both worlds” (Choudhury et al., 2022), onsite and offsite working. Hybrid working has so strongly affected our everyday life that it was included in the Oxford Dictionary in 2022, denoting “a flexible working arrangement in which employees work partly at home and partly in the office” (Oxford Dictionary, 2023). However, beyond where and when, hybrid working brings to the fore discussions around what we do and how we work, an intersection that is essential to better understand new ways of organizing based on an increasingly flexible array of work practices (Barley & Kunda, 2001).
 
Debates focusing on splitting work between the office and at least one remote workplace are widely found in the media and in consultancy reports, promoting partial and condensed views on what hybrid working entails. They may refer to personal wellbeing benefits (CIPD, 2023) while emphasizing productivity (Lee, 2023), autonomy (Christian, 2023), ideal percentages of time to work on different sites (David, 2023) and even career opportunities for women (Jacobs, 2023). Yet, these discussions are premature, as we are lacking robust evidence of what constitutes hybrid working and how the associated ways of working and organizing unfold in situated contexts.
 
While scientific dialogue on the topic is emerging, the term ‘hybrid working’ has received extensive treatment in consultancy reports. Some sources define it as a hybrid workforce model (Capgemini, 2022), others as a hybrid work model (Gartner, 2023) and others again as a hybrid workplace (Wigert et al., 2023). Despite being seemingly insignificant, a critical assessment of these differences in defining hybrid working suggests that there are at least three different dimensions to this phenomenon: (a) workforce, (b) work model, and (c) workplace. As a result, complexities emerge when considering the orchestrators of hybrid working (a), hybrid working policies and regulations (b), and the indispensability of physical sites for work (c), and require further investigation, discussions, and debate.
 
In addition, these practitioner-focused debates largely ignore that there may be a darker side to this new form of organizing as monitoring systems in particular seek to limit social actors’ agency and creativity (Soga et al., 2022), which in turn is likely to affect their health and wellbeing. Hybrid working may further shape people’s lives in ways that many of us may find difficult to imagine at present, affecting where and how we live, where our main social contacts are located, and how we spend our time and money. As such, “our existence has now become so entangled with the things surrounding us, that it is no longer possible to say where we end and they begin, and vice versa” (Introna, 2009).
 
Digital technologies thus have a critical role in hybrid working and organizing as they both mediate human-to-human relationships when working at a distance and create not always unproblematic human-to-non-human relationships between workers and technologies. For instance, the connection people may build with their mobile ICTs such as smartphones creates new opportunities and challenges for hybrid working and organizing (Mazmanian, 2019). This is particularly pertinent in relation to emerging technologies such as virtual reality, which may further shape how hybrid working and organizing are accomplished (Orel, 2022). In that sense, organizing for synthetic situations might be a central phenomenon defining hybrid working (Haubrich et al., 2024).
 
Given the entanglements between the where, when, what and how, the sub-theme seeks to harness the creative and exploratory potential of hybrid working and organizing as social actors ingeniously ‘assemble’ time, space, artifacts, relationships, boundaries, policies, processes etc. in this new way of working and organizing. Recognizing that hybrid working might be an individual preference and/or an organizational requirement, the sub-theme seeks to connect organization scholars from the EGOS community who are engaged in producing a better understanding of hybrid working and its developments in theory and practice.
 
Questions that we look forward to discussing during this sub-theme include, but are not limited to, the following:
 
Phenomenon

  • What kinds of work can meaningfully be undertaken within hybrid working?

  • Who or what are the enablers of hybrid working in diverse organizational contexts?

  • How does the involvement of human and non-human actors in hybrid working affect work and organizing?

  • What are the limits of hybrid working and organizing?

 
Theories

  • What theoretical approaches may fruitfully conceptualize hybrid working, recognizing the when, where, how, and what?

  • How do different theoretical approaches enable scholars to focus on a particular facet of hybrid working (workforce, work, and workplace models) to advance the current understanding of theory and practice?

  • In what ways can interdisciplinary approaches contribute to a deeper understanding of the dynamics of hybrid working and organizing?

  • How do theories of digital connectivity and human-computer interaction contribute to better understanding the phenomenon of hybrid working?

 
Methods

  • How can hybrid working be meaningfully studied (e.g., using qualitative, quantitative, and mixed approaches, comparative case studies, archival data, or combinations thereof)?

  • How can qualitative and quantitative data be integrated to understand hybrid working practices more comprehensively than a single approach?

  • What are the methodological opportunities and challenges in studying the long-term effects of hybrid working and organizing on workers, organizations, and communities?

 

References

  • Aroles, J., Cecez-Kecmanovic, D., Dale, K., Kingma, S. F., & Mitev, N. (2021): “New ways of working (NWW): Workplace transformation in the digital age.” Information and Organization, 31 (4), 100378.
Gislene Feiten Haubrich is a post-doctoral researcher at the House of Innovation, Stockholm School of Economics, Sweden, and current Secretary-General for the Research Group on Collaborative Spaces (RGCS; 2023–2026). Her research focuses on interactions in the workplace, considering the intersection of people, space, and technology. Gislene explores stakeholders’ organizing processes for knowledge sharing and collaboration to create solutions and overcome societal challenges.
Stefanie C. Reissner is Professor of Organization Studies at Durham University Business School, United Kingdom. Her main research interest is the social construction of work and life in an increasingly flexible and fluid environment. Stefanie focuses on the interpretive work that social actors engage in when negotiating practices, meanings, and relationships.
Marko Orel is an organizational sociologist and Associate Professor at the Prague University of Economics and Business, Czechia, where he leads the Centre for Workplace Research. He focuses on changes in workplace dynamics and work patterns through experimental, qualitative research methods. Marko has published in several journals, such as ‘Review of Managerial Science’, ‘European Management Journal’, and ‘European Journal of Cultural Studies’, among others. Marko also co-edited several edited volumes (Springer Nature, Routledge) and published a monograph on VR-accessed workplaces (Springer).
To upload your short paper, please log in to the Member Area.