The new wave of 'hybrid' work: An opportunity to revise assumptions and build theory

The motivation for this special issue lies in the recent resurgence of interest in and the accelerated adoption of hybrid work practices against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result of enforced lockdown policies, hybrid work emerged as a 'new form of work', whereby work arrangements began integrating physical workspace and time with their virtual counterparts to maintain business continuity. Hybrid work can be understood as a form of work that blends traditional office-based work with remotely located alternatives (Gratton, 2021). Earlier work on hybridity in the workplace conceptualised hybridity as combining three kinds of space: physical office-based space, home-based domestic space and virtual online cyberspace (Halford, 2005). The dynamics of the social relations and spatial arrangements that co-exist and co-evolve in such spaces have been variously explored in the literature, especially in homeworking and teleworking (Baruch, 2001; Felstead Gurstein, 2001). However, the unique situations that such a confluence affords, for example forms of work that simultaneously accommodate and shape these new organisational spaces, have not yet been explored. Indeed, recent practices, particularly during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, indicated that it is not merely the spatial dimension that bears significance over where and how hybrid work is undertaken and organised, but that the temporal dimension is crucially important as well (Gratton, 2021). Further, recent scholarship indicates that hybrid work goes beyond the confluence of space and time, but rather fuses these dimensions together to create new workspaces (Chamakiotis et al., 2023). New forms of work are seen to offer perspectives on the temporo-spatial re-organisation of work and have tended to foreground mostly social and organisational processes involved in these work modalities, for example work/life balance, the dissolution of boundaries between the personal and the professional, expanding of working time, invasion of personal space by the domination of work activities (Ellison, 2004; Nansen et al., 2010; Wapshott new ways of making those who are absent present and synchronising schedules to suit need to be re-configured (Jacobs, 2021). Some of the present thinking focuses on redesigning office space for collaboration, communal working and socialising and home-based space for thinking, working productively and focusing on tasks (Microsoft, 2021). Technology is meant to provide support for these re-configurations, by, for example, 'enabling homeworkers to drop in on casual conversations in informal meeting areas by having a videoconferencing camera streaming a kitchen area' (Jacobs, 2021). Traditionally, research on remote work has tended to 'black box' the role played by digital technologies, acknowledging them to be agents of change (Messenger de Vaujany et al., 2021), we explore the re-spatialisation and re-temporalisation of hybrid work being engendered through digital technologies and we present these two theoretically relevant areas of focus as the basis for further research in hybrid work. Space is understood to be dynamic, dialectical and full of meanings (Lefebvre, 1991). It is not absolute and cannot be independent of social practices. For example, the very same space is perceived and conceived differently by different groups of people (e.g. women/men, adults/children, minority ethnic groups); therefore, it is not possible to assign a single and objective meaning to a space. In this context, space is regarded as a (social) product (Lefebvre, 1991), which is constructed out of social relations (Massey, 1995). While specific social practices can result in a specific organisation of space, the latter can define relationships between people, activities, things and concepts within it. Spatialisation is defined as a process of constructing and creating a space in which social activities and relationships are embodied (Dobritsyna, 2019) and Lefebvre (1991) argues that spatialisation encompasses the dialectical relationship between material spatial practices, representation of space, and space of representation. Material spatial practices (experienced) refer to the spatial movement of physical and material flows to assure (commodity) production and social production. Representation of space (perceived) consists of signs and significations, codes and knowledge that enable the material practices to be 'talked about' and described either in everyday common sense and layman's terms or in special jargon used by experts. Space of representation (conceived) refers to the imagination of new meanings or possibilities for spatial practices. Production of space signals the dialectical relationships between these practices. Hybrid work involves at least three spaces: public, private (or remote) and virtual (Halford, 2005). Public space refers to centralised office; private space refers to one's personal work environment; and virtual space refers to computer-generated cyberspace. In the context of hybrid work, the office is valued as a performative space where socialisation and office activities take place and formal working rhythms are defined; virtual space is valued as a space where signs, symbols, images and discourses are produced and exchanged. The hybrid workspace is an integrative space, which fuses public, private and virtual spaces into one entity to enable frictionless spatial movement of people, activities and material flows. As such, hybrid work entails the re-spatialisation of traditional workplaces and domestic spaces (Halford, 2005). The re-spatialisation of domestic spaces essentially requires hybrid workers and co-residents in the same household to re-examine their experience, perception and conception of 'home', and subsequently to re-configure the spatial organisation of the household. Spatial arrangements, social relations and social practices within households are transformed because of the introduction of economic activities previously performed in the public domain into the private space. At the same time, the traditional workplace is also re-spatialised because hybrid work requires both workers and employers to re-examine their experience, perception and conception of office spaces to construct a new workspace that reflects the new hybrid work arrangements and embodies new social practices. 'The question of time remains open, riddled with paradox and infinitely arguable' (Grant et al., 2015, p. 3). Indeed, there are multiple and diverse conceptualisations of time, that range from exclusively objectivist approaches to entirely subjective theorisations, and studies tend to adopt different perspectives, depending on the investigated phenomenon, the disciplinary positioning as well as ontological concerns. Focusing exclusively on work-related studies, the question of time has been examined through the impact and nature of travel time (e.g., time spent on commuting) (Bonsall Oborn Orlikowski Dorow Mazmanian et al., 2013; Sewell Vidan Halford, 2005). The consequences of re-spatialisation and re-temporalisation of work, organisation and management include increasing the autonomy of the individual worker in determining when and where to work (O'Connor et al., 2023), increasing flexibility of when and where work is performed, and reconfiguration of social relationships between co-workers (Halford, 2005; Sewell Waizenegger et al., 2020), and routine jobs, such as data entry and data processing (Stanworth, 1998), to occur outside traditionally defined spatial and temporal boundaries, such as office buildings, home-based offices, and 9–5 work patterns. Yet, despite the importance of IS, very few studies have focused on the IS as an artefact that affords (re)fining spatiotemporal boundaries of work, organisation, and management (e.g., Abelsen et al., 2021; Bélanger Greenhill Hacker et al., 2020; Messenger Waizenegger et al., 2020). With regards to the materiality of technology more specifically, despite this being intertwined with the social aspect of work (Orlikowski Bélanger Greenhill Messenger Siegert Waizenegger et al., 2020), theorising and explaining how technology and systems mediate new work modalities and how they create and shape new spaces for/of connectivity. We argue that opening the 'black box' to explore the relationships between digital technologies and the temporo-spatial configurations of new ways of working could draw upon existing theorisations as above or create new research pathways such as those potentially offered by exploring the mediating role of technology in work-time–space configurations using concepts from post phenomenology (Idhe, 2009) or the generative mechanisms of ensembles in creating the conditions for time–space-work reconfigurations by drawing on critical realist thinking (Mingers et al., 2013). There is also room for incorporating the wider social science literature that explores issues of power, control, systemic injustice and other topics in a more critical theoretical research tradition. This is especially important where the nexus between technology, hybrid work and temporo-spatial arrangements could impact those who are already excluded from privilege or marginalised in some other way. This special issue comprises of four papers, each providing insights into hybrid work from different vantage points. All four touch upon in some way the virtuality-materiality nexus, helping to advance our understanding of hybrid work through a fusion of time, space and digital technology, where the latter is placed centred stage. Benabid and Abdalla Mikhaeil (2024) focus specifically on the visibility paradox that emerges within hybrid workspaces, and investigate workplace learning and the affordances on enterprise social networks (ESN). The authors place a considerate emphasis on how ESN promote collaboration and connection among geographically dispersed individuals, and the ways in which such technologies can promote and support learning. At the same time, however, they unearth and highlight socially constructed tensions arising due to visibility concerns and the integration of ESN within vicarious learning practices, some of such tensions pertaining to information overload, and availability. These socially constructed tensions, the authors argue, indicate the existence and importance of spatiotemporal relationships, where individuals make spatiotemporal adjustments to their practice for learning-related activities, particularly because vicarious learning in hybrid work arrangement takes place within both the personal and the professional domains, in digital and physical workspaces. John et al. (2024) focus around a different kind of digital technology and investigate employee experience management (EXM) platforms. In doing so, they focus on digital embeddedness, and draw from Suchman's configuration lens (Suchman, 2007) to unpack the ways in which humans and technologies influence, shape and reshape each other. Their work highlights very clearly the virtuality-materiality nexus, as they illuminate the ways in which EXM become embedded in hybrid work, and create two different versions of such embeddedness, the digital/human and the digital/workplace. More crucially, the authors explain that both versions configure and reconfigure each other over time through adaptation, transformation and reconfiguration. Crucially, the authors provide a very clear illustration of how Microsoft Viva, the EXM platform under investigation, contributes in the configuration and reconfiguration process of employee experience and hybrid work. Lamovšek et al. (2024) also focus on configurations, but specifically work design configurations, and examine differences among these within the context of on-site, remote and hybrid work arrangements, and with reference to high task performance. Based on their findings, the authors argue, that the hybrid work modality is the most complicated work design among these three, where on-site and remote work elements get combined, and where there are greater demands in terms of task variety, information processing and enhanced feedback mechanisms. These elements evidently influence employees' task performance, but at the same time, we intuitively understand that these constitute integral considerations for the design and use of digital technologies, as the degree of virtuality and the materiality of said technologies will pose demands and offer opportunities for adjusting task variety, facilitating information processing as well as capturing and communicating feedback to employees and organisations. This study further highlights the significance of combining IS and Organisation Studies for understanding and examining the domain of hybrid work. The final paper is that by Griva et al. (2024) and focuses on creating strategies for the 'third way of working' bringing time to the forefront of hybrid work design. The study addresses the fact that time is often omitted or oversimplified in hybrid work literature, which typically focuses on concepts such as time differences, flexibility, asynchronicity and temporal boundaries. The authors highlight that temporal concepts are crucial in hybrid settings, as the speeding up of activities, temporal rhythms and personalities affect employees' collaboration and productivity, and they also pinpoint temporal concepts that must be considered when designing hybrid work. In this regard, the authors challenge the assumption that work activities and their temporal mapping conducted in the physical space can be faithfully replicated in the digital space without changing any aspects of the work; instead, the authors argue that in a hybrid work environment, augmentation is required to adapt the temporal mapping of work activities in the digital space to achieve better outcomes. To conclude, the papers in this Special Issue conceptualise and investigate hybrid work by considering temporo-spatial configurations of work and the role of technologies in such configurations. They contribute interesting and novel insights to the existing literature of alternative work modalities, such as hybrid work, and help us understand and influence further work through a spatiotemporal perspective, where virtuality and materiality are interwoven together.