Negotiating Control

In this book, the author shows how employees, organizations, and even friends and family are struggling to understand how the expected norms for mobile-communication connectedness function when people are working. Until the early 2000s workplaces provided most of the computers and portable devices that employees used to do their jobs and communicate with others. Now, people bring their own mobile devices to work, use them to circumvent official organizational channels, and create new norms for how communication occurs. Managers and organizations set policies, enforce rules, and create their own workarounds to navigate the ever-changing mobile-communication environment. This book draws on over two decades of research studies and fieldwork, consisting of 150 distinct interviews and focus groups, representing people in over 35 different types of jobs, to claim that people assume mobile communication is a uniform practice. Instead, the book reveals underlying—often hidden—issues of control and power that shape how people are permitted and expected to use mobiles to communicate while working. The stories and extended examples reveal a wide-ranging account of how these portable tools are used across work environments today. The book develops a grounded theory describing the ongoing negotiation for control when people use their personally owned devices while working. These lifelines integrate information, communication, and data, and they connect people in unexpected and often conflicting ways.