Paper short abstract:

Looking at digital work(places) from a practice-theoretical perspective allows us to identify them as a translocal mesh of socio-material arrangements. Using an ethnographic study, the "acts of framing" required in digital practices are analysed as a necessity and an opportunity for transformation.

Paper long abstract:

With the proceeding digitalisation of more and more areas of society, including work, there is an ongoing debate about which role materiality, bodies and their arrangements play in digital practices. This contribution offers a subjectivation-theoretically extended practice-theoretical perspective (Alkemeyer e.a. 2015), which makes it possible to neither assume disparate, dematerialised and disembodied digital work practices nor to ignore the particularities of digital/digitalised social practices. Thus, digitalised work practices come into view as translocal "assemblages" (Schönian 2011) of spatially distributed socio-material settings and participants of practices. The digital workplace is therefore not a place, it is a composite "synthetic situation" (Knorr Cetina 2009). Practice-theoretically there is also no such thing as digital work, but these are rather practices in a contingent performative production process that are constantly actualised anew and situationally. For this reason already, the digitalisation of work(places) cannot be understood as an "inevitable fate that organisations and employees have to face".

I will present results from a research project that ethnographically examines the production of digital university seminars (Holzkamp 2021). It shows that the translocal socio-material setting confronts the participants of the digital practice with various moments of dissolution of boundaries ("Entgrenzung") of the digital practice of seminar making. This, I argue, must be captured and compensated for by the participants of the practice through additional acts of framing (with Goffman’s "frames", 1980). I would like to propose that this necessity for framing can also be understood as a possibility - for undermining, appropriating and transforming digital work practices.