The digital ideal worker image: How digital technology is shifting work’s temporal and spatial boundaries

Acker’s theory that organizations and the jobs within them are designed around a masculine image of an ideal worker ( 1990 ) has had an outsized impact for scholarly understanding of work, organizations and inequality. Yet, digital technologies have altered the work world that Acker explained by disrupting work’s longstanding time and space boundaries. We bring extant scholarship on the classic ideal worker image together with research on the rising use of digital technology at work to theorize the emergence of a digital ideal worker image . We argue that this image is shaped by assumptions about time and space associated with the classic ideal worker image, but that digital technologies also create new expectations about when and where people should work. Our analysis points to a multidimensional expansion of temporal expectations and a loosened, reconfigured set of spatial expectations. We unpack how digital technologies control adherence to the digital ideal worker image, the sophisticated digital and relational skills that digital ideal workers must develop and examine the image’s distinctive implications for inequality. We root our theorizing in examples from three widespread applications of digital technologies at work—remote work, platform work, and generative AI. We conclude by proposing novel research directions for scholarship on digital ideal workers and the work world that they inhabit.