How do you fix knowledge in place? Digital nomads and infrastructural stickiness

Remote work has become increasingly accessible due to the growing acceptance of remote work arrangements following the COVID-19 pandemic. Some state actors, especially in countries which face a shortage of digital talent and have reputations as leisure-tourism destinations, have begun considering the opportunities for digital transformation or workforce upskilling that highly skilled remote workers may offer. This paper develops the case of remote workers in Thailand to argue that infrastructural stickiness is a critical determinant for effective knowledge transfer to occur. By infrastructural stickiness we refer to the regulatory and socio-material infrastructures that both attract and retain international remote workers to a particular place, while also attempting to extract and ‘fix’ their skills and knowledge in place. The challenge of generating the right amount of stickiness emerges as people can be fixed in place relatively easily, but the human relationships necessary for knowledge transfer are more resistant to infrastructural machinations. Integrating perspectives gained from interviews with both state agencies and remote workers, we illustrate the difficulties in facilitating successful knowledge transfer from remote workers amidst their positioning as embedded tourists who nonetheless remain separate from the local population.