New information and communication technologies enable the spatial reconfiguration of work opening up possibilities for work to take place across multiple locations. This paper explores the implications of hybrid workspace through a new empirical study. It argues that spatial hybridity changes the nature of work, organisation and management across domestic space, organisational space and in cyberspace. IntroductionOne of the central issues in the study of new technology, work and employment has been the way that information and communication technologies (ICTs) enable the spatial reconfiguration of work, management and organisation. Specifically, there has been wide ranging interest in the (interconnected) possibilities for teleworking and for virtual organisation. In the former case, ICTs are used to enable remote working, usually from home. In the latter case, similar technologies are employed to enable virtual organisational structures and relationships to operate with little or no face-toface contact. In spatial terms, there is a hollowing out of the fixed organisational workspace and a polarisation towards the relocation of work into domestic space on the one hand and the dislocation of work into cyberspace on the other. In both cases, there has been speculation and research suggesting that new organisational, social and personal relationships may accompany these new spatial arrangements, highlighting the entangled interrelations between space, work and organisation.However, research on both homeworking and virtual organisation fails to address directly an important empirical aspect to this re-spatialisation. That is, that significant numbers of people work both from home and from an organisational workplace, using virtual technologies to connect the two spaces. Whilst previous debates about teleworking and virtual organisation are relevant to this group, none explores directly the individual or organisational practices, experiences and implications of this mode of New Technology, Work and Employment 20:1 working. Being employed to work both at home and also in an organisational setting, using ICTs to maintain workloads and relationships across both domestic and organisational spaces raises new questions that lead beyond the sum of existing debates about teleworking and virtual organisation. Specifically, these concern hybrid workspace. These individuals work at home and engage in embodied organisational spaces; they conduct relationships virtually and in close proximity. How does this combination of organisational and domestic spaces, mediated in cyberspace, impact on practices of work, organisation and management?This paper explores these questions, examining working practices, organisational relationships, and managerial techniques in hybrid workspace. Based on a new empirical study of managerial and technical staff, the paper examines the impact of spatial hybridity at both individual and organisational levels. Through the empirical material, the paper shows that spatial hybridity changes the nature of wo...

This paper explores the relations between management discourse and employee subjectivity in the process of organizational change, drawing on a new empirical study of doctors and nurses working in the British National Health Service (NHS). It builds on recent critiques of more muscular accounts of discourse to examine the manoeuvres made by working subjects in response to managerialist discourses of the entrepreneurial self. While others have shown that alternative discourses including gender, age and profession are important here, this paper argues that we must pay attention to the spatial and temporal contexts within which such generic discourses are received and understood in order to interpret the practices of subjectivity and power in organizational life. We suggest that this approach allows new insights to policy concerns in the NHS; to our understanding of the nature of work subjectivities; and to sociological understandings of organizational power.

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This paper aims to contribute to, and extend, the emergent Sociology of organizational space. It engages critically with labour process approaches, which position space within a control-resistance paradigm, suggesting that the conceptualization of space embedded within these accounts is limited and limiting. Drawing on insights from cultural geography the paper uses a new empirical study to show the ways that spatial meanings and spatial practices in the micro-spaces of office life are constructed through diverse experiences, memories and identities operating at a range of spatial scales.

The emergence of big data is both promising and challenging for social research. This paper suggests that realising this promise has been restricted by the methods applied in social science research, which undermine our potential to apprehend the qualities that make big data so appealing, not least in relation to the sociology of networks and flows. With specific reference to the micro-blogging website Twitter, the paper outlines a set of methodological principles for approaching these data that stand in contrast to previous research; and introduces a new tool for harvesting and analysing Twitter built on these principles. We work our argument through an analysis of Twitter data linked to political protest over UK University fees. Our approach transcends earlier methodological limitations to offer original insights into the flow of information and the actors and networks that emerge in this flow.

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Three aspects of the relationship between nurse and hospital spaces are considered. First, the degree of access that nurses have to the different hospital spaces is limited, and many are confined to the wards in which they work. The high proportion of female nurses working on wards means that there are marked gender differences in access to hospital spaces. There are also marked professional differences when nurses are compared to doctors who have much greater freedom to roam and there are differences in the amount of private space allocated to nurses and doctors. Second, styles of bodily movement in space are also highly differentiated by profession and gender. Third, different spaces have very different meanings attached to them, and this has a strong impact on styles of performance and identity. Attention to space thus offers original insights to nurses working conditions as well as to inter-professional relations.