Kietzmann, Jan

(2006)

Conceptualising Mobile Communities of Practice

Mobile telephones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and Blackberry terminals have made fast inroads into people's private and organisational pockets. New mobile applications coupled with improvements of mobile technology and infrastructure keep raising the bar of information exchange and interpersonal communication opportunities to new heights.

My research sets out to explore how mobile technology and mobile communication change work practices, particularly with respect to informal and dynamic networks of people within and among organisations. In order to appreciate this new form of organising work, the conceptualisation of mobile communities of practices is placed in the setting of the modern, bureaucratic organisation.

The analysis builds on Wenger's understanding of communities of practices but examines people not in co-located or distributed settings but in mobile work environments. It concentrates on 'traditional' workers who spend varying proportions of their work-days in co-located settings and away from one another, and who now remain connected through mobile technology. Work patterns include user behaviour that is not visible on the surface but implanted and hidden in work practices that emerge from often unexpected activities within mobile environments.

This research addresses this ongoing dialectic between structured and dynamic, formal and informal organising and between intended and actual work practices.

As a theoretical underpinning I will employ activity theory as a recognised conceptual framework for describing the structure, development, and context of computer-supported activities. I feel that Engeström's activity model particularly lends itself to the analysis of mobile work practices due to its theoretical tenets and the model's practical emphasis on constituents of structure, activity and human agency.

Supervisor: Carsten Sorensen, PhD

Jan Kietzmann is currently an Assistant Professor at SFU Business, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada