Compared with assembling engines, hairdressing or care work, digital work is clearly less place-bound. This makes possible new constellations of space for all kinds of work that rely heavily on information and communication technology (ICT). While it is argued that digital work can be done anywhere, labour, as with all human activities, always ‘takes place’ in particular localities. These localities are far from being evenly distributed in geographic space; there is thus no ‘areal uniformity’ (Graham 1998). Rather, activities in the internet age are actually more and more clustered in ‘nodal landing places’ (Castells 2010) of transnational networks. Thus, while remote and mobile digital work are the result of the tendency to free work from particular places, closer scrutiny reveals that place and distance keep up their importance, giving rise to new, more complicated spatial dynamics in the organization of work (Swyngedouw 1993). Digital businesses and work in the current political economy do show particular historical spatial fixes of capital valorisation (Harvey 1982) even though the dynamics and fluidity may be much higher than in other industries or epochs. This is to say that the combinations of capital, labour, occupational milieus, etc. in a particular location can be expected to be more transient and the ‘territorial embeddedness’ (Hess 2004) weaker than with other business activities. Still, as a starting point of analysing space, place and digital work we can assume that digital work is characterised by both ‘placelessness’ and stickiness, by both dispersion and spatial concentration.
The spatial relation in this context relates, among others, to the geo-graphies of digital work at a transnational or global scale. Since the wave of offshoring in the 1990s and 2000s we have observed a delocalisation of service functions, including customer service, software development or creative and administrative tasks (Huws et al. 2004, Holtgrewe 2014). What is more, work seems to become virtual if work objects are digital and tools and knowledge are standardised at a global scale with the internet providing access to information spaces from all localities with sufficient connectivity (Huws 2006). ‘Informatisation’, understood as the growing importance of information and information processing (Schmiede 1996), is not a new phenomenon but a long term societal development that has brought about the conditions for many forms of digital work. Today, the shift to services and the tertiarisation of manufacturing in the so-called knowledge economy accelerate the spread of digital work and intensify the worldwide competition between educated workers, the global ‘cybertariat’ (Huws 2003).
‘New geographies’ of various industries in the digital economy are emerging as a result of the tendency to offshore administrative, service and creative functions. The relocation of work at a global scale, best epitomised by the ascent of India’s information technology (IT) and business process outsourcing industries (Parthasarathy 2005, Taylor et al. 2014), signaled a new ‘new international division of labour’ after the one in manufacturing from the 1960s onwards. In addition to concerns about employment in the old global core, as well as regional development in the periphery, this raised questions about the nature and dynamics of global value chains and networks and their consequences for workers. In recent years, both the spatial aspects of labour processes and the role of labour in global value chains have received increased scholarly attention. This has resulted in more and more interlinkages between the fields of Labour Process Analysis and Global Production Networks (Newsome et al. 2015, Coe 2015). The spatial dynamics of digital work at a transnational and global scale can be informed by these debates and, in turn, contribute to them.
Apart from the movements of global value chains and networks and the changes in the international division of labour, the emergence of internet-based business models, forms of labour and ways of working have become crucial for the delocalisation of digital work. From applications for computer-supported cooperative work within corporations to the dispersion of tasks over crowdsourcing platforms, it is a common feature of a wide range of phenomena that work seems to move to global information spaces (Boes and Kämpf 2010) where collaboration takes place and value is created. As a consequence, debates on digital work address the interrelations between different types of spaces: physical and geographical space, organisational space, cultural space and social space. In particular, transnational social spaces (Pries 2008) and global digital formations (Latham and Sassen 2005) rely on mediatisation and the use of electronic networks. It is important to note, however, that the digital does not dissolve into cyberspace. Rather, software and data, often seen as immaterial, remain bound to a material fabric of physically-composed infrastructures of computers and networks (Kinsley 2013).
What is more, in these debates the global and the local are not seen as mutually exclusive and hierarchically ordered (Herod 2008). Rather, the global economy touches down in various national territories, ‘its topo-graphy moves between digital space and places in national territories’ (Sassen 2007:32). As a consequence of movements of denationalisation, ‘global processes do not need to move through the hierarchies of national states; they can directly become articulated with certain kinds of localities and local actors’ (ibid: 33) elsewhere. To understand the characteristics of the local and the global and to conceptualise the interrelations between them, we are referring to the concept of spatial scales (Brenner 2001). It seems helpful to consider various manifestations of digital work as multiscalar phenomena taking place in a particular locality of the office, the home or a local occupational network and simultaneously being shaped by and impacting on activities and structures on other spatial scales such as the national, transnational or global.
This edited volume looks at current analyses of digital workplaces and workers within the complex tension between tremendously enlarged options for delocalising work and restructuring global value chains on the one hand and, on the other, the embeddedness of knowledge, activities and relationships in particular localities between the potential ubiquity of virtual collaboration and the need for face-to-face contact and particular competences to cope with these new working environments. The volume seeks to feature a wide range of both established and emerging spatial dynamics and to enhance our understanding of the concepts of space and place in the study of digital work. It explores the dynamics of global value chains and shifts in the international division of labour, the impact these have on employment and working conditions, workers’ agency in shaping and coping with changes in work, and the new capabilities and competencies needed in virtual organisational environments. Thus, the volume does not engage in the debate about the interaction between the technological transformation of society and the evolution of its spatial forms (Castells 2010). Rather, combining different disciplinary perspectives, the volume teases out the spatial aspects of digital work at different scales ranging from the team level to that of global production networks.
The volume’s first part is dedicated to exploring the shaping of digital work and its spatial dynamics. The main focus lies with the preconditions and consequences of delocalisation of ICT-enabled work. While it is often assumed that for digital work space and place are of decreasing relevance, little is said about the necessary restructuring and the ensuing characteristics of labour processes that bring about this kind of digital work. Nor is there a focus on the limitations to dislocation inherent in the work itself, the social relations or the physical artefacts involved. Currently, interest in workers’ agency in global production networks is gaining currency (Newsome et al. 2015), raising questions about the role of spatially dispersed workers and their opportunities for collective organisation.
In their contribution, Flecker and Schönauer discuss the preconditions of delocalisation, arguing that digital work cannot be assumed to be ‘placeless’. If delocalisation is possible, as a rule this stems from active designing and shaping of work so that it can be carried out in different places or by dispersed teams. As a consequence, the character of work is being changed in this process. This view is corroborated by Will-Zochol’s study on engineering work in the automotive industry presented in the second chapter.The chapter describes the emergence of new topologies of work through informatisation and globalisation of product development. Codification of knowledge, virtualisation of artefacts and standardisation of tasks and processes make delocalisation possible. Yet, as virtual representations cannot replace physical prototypes completely and spatial proximity is partly highly valued, there are clear limits to the globalisation of engineering work. In the third chapter, Lehdonvirta takes up the issue using micro-work as an empirical example. He argues that micro-work is not inherently delocalised work. Rather, microwork platforms make specific efforts and use particular technologies that render work relatively placeless. As workers do not come together in workplaces, it is difficult for them to know each other and to develop shared identities, trust and solidarity, which, in turn, weakens their bargaining power and obstructs attempts to reach collective organisation.
In the second part of the volume the focus is on the dynamics of value chains in various industries and business functions looking at the globalisation of production, interfirm relations and the quality of work and employment. Here, spatial aspects relate to different scales and several levels of enquiry such as the geographies of the international and interregional division of labour that stem from the dynamics of foreign direct investment and the restructuring of global value chains and production networks. Hardy and Hollinshead take as a starting point the footloose nature and placelessness of digital work in business services and IT and ask about the benefits that can be brought to the countries, regions and localities within which they are (re)located. Using the concept of territorial embeddedness, they analyse to what extent business services offshored to the Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), and IT programming relocated to Ukraine, are ‘sticky’ in these places. They show that both occupy a peripheral position in global divisions of labour for digital work for which they are in constant competition with other ‘places’. In her contribution, Sproll links global dynamics in the financial sector with restructuring at national and regional levels and its social effects. Drawing on empirical research on the formation of call centres within banks and the outsourcing of banking services to external call centres in Brazil, she describes changes in the organisation of work and ambiguous inequalities with regard to gender, race and class stemming from deepening labour market segmentations. Using the Brazilian city of Londrína as an example, Wolff explores the implication of global value chains for local development in the context of programmes for the promotion of entrepreneurship and the generation of employment in Brazil. Presenting such ‘Local Productive Arrangements’ for information technology as chains of precarisation, the chapter draws conclusions regarding the impact of these policies on the quality of work. Noronha and D’Cruz focus on IT and IT-enabled services in India and describe how the Indian state created, differing by geographical regions, the enabling conditions for Indian IT firms to engage with global markets by enhancing the quality of human resources. They also point to the often ignored role of the state in granting exemptions to labour regulations. As a consequence, economic upgrading achieved by inserting the IT and related service industries into global production networks has not resulted in social upgrading.
The third part of this volume addresses digital work on the levels of the organisation and the labour process. Here, the focus is on how individuals and groups manage distributed and mobile work and social relationships in different spaces: the physical space (and place), the various social spaces and the information space. The working condition...