Virtual Mobility and the Lonely Cloud: Theorizing the Mobility‐Isolation Paradox for Self‐Employed Knowledge‐Workers in the Online Home‐Based Business Context

Abstract

We advance both mobility and paradox theorizing by advocating the new concepts of 'mobility-isolation paradox' and 'paradoxical imagination'. These emerged from examining the nuanced, multifaceted conceptualizations of the mobility-isolation tensions facing home-based, self-employed, online knowledge-workers. We thereby enhance current conceptual understandings of mobility, isolation and paradox by analyzing knowledge-workers' interrelated, multidimensional experiences within restrictive homebased working contexts. We compare the dearth of research and theorizing about these autonomous online knowledge-workers with that available about other types of knowledgeworkers, such as online home-based employees, and the more physically/corporeally mobile self-employed. This research into an increasingly prevalent knowledge-worker genre addresses these knowledge gaps by analyzing home-based knowledge-workers' views, and tensions from paradoxical pressures to be corporeally mobile and less isolated. Despite enjoying career, mental and virtual mobility through internet-connectedness, they were found to seek face-to-face social and/or professional interactions, their isolation engendering loneliness, despite their solitude paradoxically often fostering creativity and innovation.

Knowledge Worker Mobility in Context: Pushing the Boundaries of Theory and Methods

“…The papers push the theoretical boundary of the current literature on KWM by including a variety of theory testing and building. The special issue papers contribute to paradox theory (Daniel, DiDomenico and Nunan, 2017), knowledge combination and Findings and conclusions not found to boost pushed spin-offs' productivity, or to increase their growth prospects, which does not give support to the knowledge transfer mechanism.…”

“…We summarize the papers in the Special Issue in Table I. The papers reflect the different contextual dimensions of mobility, sometimes covering more than one aspect: organizational (Rocha, Carneiro and Varum, 2017;Park, Howard, and Gomulya, 2017;Brymer and Sirmon, 2017); geographical and spatial (Franzoni, Scellato and Stephan, 2017); social (Brymer and Sirmon, 2017;Daniel, DiDomenico and Nunan, 2017); and institutional and cultural (Rocha, Carneiro and Varum, 2017;Ejermo and Schubert, 2017;Franzoni, Scellato and Stephan, 2017).…”

“…In addition to analyses of novel firm-level and team-level data, other studies in this special issue investigate their research questions using individual-level data such as the employer-employee dataset of Swedish inventors (Ejermo and Schubert, 2017), and the data of partners in US based law firms (Brymer and Sirmon, 2017). Lastly, we include an in-depth qualitative study in this issue (Daniel, DiDomenico and Nunan, 2017).…”

On the Use of Paradox for Generating Theoretical Contributions in Management and Organization Research

“…While such inquiry would be beneficial for many noted instances of paradox, we argue scholarly attention to be most acute for those phenomena that characterize the shifting playing field in which current-day organizations operate. The work of Daniel et al (2018) offers an example to this call: noting mobility and isolation of online home-workers to be related paradoxically, the authors eventually push beyond the boundaries of this initial identification, questioning how the noted paradoxical experience can extend paradox theorizing as such (p. 176). With many outsets of noted paradoxical phenomena still remaining conceptually unexplored, we argue plenty of interesting hinging points to be abound for future research to spring from.…”

Cenário das publicações científicas em carreira e gênero

“…No que tange o contexto global, a abertura econômica e, por conseguinte, a internacionalização das empresas, tornaram possíveis e necessárias as carreiras globais e a virtualização do trabalho. Entretanto, restrições de mobilidade geográfica e mobilidades meramente virtuais também são consequências das modificações nas relações de trabalho na arena global (Cresswell & Uteng, 2016;Daniel, Di Domenico & Nunan, 2018).…”