The rapid and accelerating move towards use of mobile technologies has increasingly provided people and organizations with the ability to work away from the office and on the move. The new ways of working afforded by these technologies are often characterized in terms of access to information and people anytime, anywhere. This article presents a study of mobile workers that highlights different facets of access to remote people and information, and different facets of anytime, anywhere. Four key factors in mobile work are identified: the role of planning, working in "dead time," accessing remote technological and informational resources, and monitoring the activities of remote colleagues. By reflecting on these issues, we can better understand the role of technology and artifacts in mobile work and identify the opportunities for the development of appropriate technological solutions to support mobile workers.

In this paper we examine the spatial practices of mobile workers—how mobile workers manage their use of technology and place. Data from interviews with highly mobile workers and ‘hot-deskers’ are used to explore the reciprocal relationship between practice and place: how places change work, but also how work changes places. Mobile workers often need to configure their activities to take account of the different places in which they find themselves. This can involve considerable ‘juggling’ of their plans, humble office equipment, and their coworkers. In turn mobile workers change places, as they appropriate different sites for their work. Specifically, technology allows for the limited reappropriation of travel and leisure sites as places for work (such as trains and cafés). Time is also an important practical concern for mobile workers. Although mobile work may be seen as relatively flexible, fixed temporal structures allow mobile workers to ‘accomplish synchronicity’ with others. Although this paper focuses on the specific practices of mobile workers, it also explores how ‘grand social theory’ can help us understand the practical details of mobile work, yet how practice cannot be simply reduced to theory.

Abstract. While tourism presents considerable potential for the use of new mobile technologies, we currently have little understanding of how tourists organise their activities or of the problems they face. This paper presents an ethnographic study of city tourists' practices that draws out a number of implications for designing tourist technology. We describe how tourists work together in groups, collaborate around maps and guidebooks, and both 'pre-' and 'post-visit' places. Implications are drawn for three types of tourist technology: systems that explicitly support how tourists co-ordinate, electronic guidebooks and maps, and electronic tour guide applications. We discuss applications of these findings, including the Travelblog, which supports building travel-based web pages while on holiday.

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