Beyond the Factory Paradigm: Digital Nomadism and the Digital Future(s) of Knowledge Work Post-COVID-19

Research on Remote Work in the Era of COVID-19

“…It is an intriguing notion that the remote work itself has become a kind of new institution with its own new logic. An Institutional Logic is defined as a socially-constructed, historical pattern of material practices and symbolic systems (which include assumptions, values, beliefs, and rules) that guides daily activity for both organizations and individuals (Thornton, Ocasio, & Lounsbury, 2012). The historically-situated and supraorganizational aspects of a new institutional logic (Ocasio, Mauskapf, & Steele, 2016) One final anecdote: A VP for a high-tech firm in the area recently challenged me that the education industry was going to change forever and there was nothing stopping us from going 100% online.…”

'Micro-terrorism': COVID-19 Makes the Horrible Face of Microbiology

“…On the other hand, the digital economy in the COVID-19 era witnesses some flourishment of digital behaviours such as remote working, learning, telemedicine and delivery services including drugs and clothes [7]. The policymakers and employers will sooner realize that in many jobs there is not a great difference between working from home and working in the field.…”

The Emerging Liquid IT Workforce: Theorizing Their Personal Competitive Advantage

“…Some industry reports go even further and predict that within a decade we could expect to see a new Global 2000 company without any full-time employees apart from senior executives (Daugherty et al, 2016). Consequently, new types of 'on-demand by choice' IT workforce are constantly emerging, including crowdsourced workers (Pedersen et al, 2013;Zhao & Zhu, 2014;Deng & Joshi, 2016;Taylor & Joshi, 2018), digital nomadic workers (Wang et al, 2020;Schlagwein & Jarrahi, 2020) and, as discussed here, liquid workers. Indeed, according to influential industry reports, the liquid workforcetemporary, on-demand and highly specialized knowledge workers (Liu, 2020a) is expected to grow very rapidly (Gupta, 2018(Gupta, , 2019 to the extent that is becoming a new norm (Gallagher and Savoy, 2017).…”