Conceptualising and measuring the location of work: Work location as a probability space

Abstract

There is currently considerable interest in workers performing tasks from a variety of workplaces, such as co-working spaces, transport-networks and cafés. However, it remains difficult to ascertain the extent to which this workplace mobility is altering urban economic geography, since most analyses of the location of economic activity in cities are based upon census-type data that assume a unique place of work for each worker. In this paper I propose a framework that extends the concept of place of work: work is probabilistically assigned to different types of workplace according to the proportion of work time spent in each. The limitations of census data are discussed and illustrated, after which the framework is operationalised in an exploratory survey. Census data suggest a modest increase in workplace mobility, with most work still taking place either at home or in a fixed workplace. The paper’s principal contribution is to explain these data’s limitations and show how work location can be operationalised as a probability space.

New spatialities of work in the city

“…Census of Population data has been a unique source for studying workplace geographies, commutes and day-/night-time populations of places. However, as Shearmur (2020) shows, these data are not able to sufficiently capture where people work. He suggests instead to measure the location and time spent working in a variety of places, which allows us to estimate the spatiotemporal work patterns and to predict what the author calls a 'probability space' of work in cities.…”

“…Burchell et al (2021) also use a novel concept of workplace location that measures where people work and how often they work in a particular type of place, including the home, employers’ premises and public spaces. This concept is less detailed than the one suggested by Shearmur (2021), but is able to sufficiently capture the concept of ‘multi-locality’, which the authors can measure on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. Using European survey data, the authors reveal the practised ‘hyper complexity’ of workers’ workplace locations in contemporary urban Europe.…”

The Impact of the Coronacrisis on KIBS Sector

“…The share of KIBS workers attending the "usual" workplace decreased from 75.5% in 1996 to 72.0% in 2006 and 70.7% in 2016. In addition, 1.6% of KIBS workers in 2016 worked from abroad [Shearmur, 2020]. In the EU-27, the top two sectors for teleworking by 2018 were IT and communications services, followed by other KIBS, education, and publishing/broadcasting.…”

Towards a post-COVID geography of economic activity: Using probability spaces to decipher Montreal’s changing workscapes

“…We outline below an approach to measuring the location of work recently suggested by Shearmur (2020) . It builds upon Felstead et al’s (2005) concept of workscape, extending the approach adopted by researchers such as Ojala and Pyöriä (2018) , Wheatley (2020) and Burchell et al (2020) , and implemented in the European Working Conditions Survey ( EWCS, 2015 ) as well as in some case studies ( Thomsin and Tremblay, 2008 ).…”

“…However, we argue that concepts developed by organisation scholars and sociologists should inform this assumption. More specifically, we operationalise Shearmur’s (2020) suggestion that planners and economic geographers should view work location as a probability space, an idea that builds upon earlier work in organisation studies ( Felstead et al, 2005 ; Taskin, 2010 ; Thomsin and Tremblay, 2008 ) and on more recent survey approaches ( EWCS, 2015 ). This approach is applied in a population-wide survey of Montreal workers, conducted in June and July 2020.…”