Grounded transformations: Body, space and creativity in an increasingly virtual world of work

This dissertation examines how workplace flexibility is experienced in the daily reality of knowledge work and how it affects work practices, creativity and well-being. The ability to choose where and when to work has become an increasingly prevalent characteristic of knowledge work. It is believed to increase autonomy, productivity and creativity at work. However, flexible working patterns have also been suggested to lead to the blurring of boundaries between work and private life, fragmentation of work and, consequently, intensification of work. This dissertation analyses its topic empirically by studying knowledge workers’ short-term collective telework periods in a novel environment: that of rural archipelago. The methodological approach uses both qualitative analysis of interview data and quantitative analysis of longitudinal questionnaire data.

Telework periods were arranged as an experiment during a prior research project. What originally stood out from the experiment was how the study participants oriented themselves to the extraordinary working and living space with affectively rich and experimental ways. This observation solicited this dissertation’s phenomenological approach as it focuses on how spatial movement and change are bodily experienced. To elaborate upon these themes, the dissertation utilises Merleau-Ponty’s bodily phenomenology and Lefebvre’s theory of spatial trialectic, among other theories, in its effort to grasp how lived space affects perception, and how while we use space for our practical ends, the space reflects back on us on an affective level. For the purposes of this dissertation, particularly interesting are spaces that are not definite, clearly designated and rule-bound, as are most office spaces, but spaces that are instead malleable and open to experimentation, as the rural archipelago environment was for the participating knowledge workers. Experiences of such spaces are relevant today as fluid and mobile knowledge work increasingly places workers in contingent and even contradictory spaces.

Changing spaces of work are a challenge for workplace infrastructure, but this dissertation suggests that they are also an existential condition. The archipelago participants oriented to the new and extraordinary work environment with a playful and probing attitude while also engaging in more serious reflection about their existing working patterns and directions of their careers. This dissertation suggests that creativity at work is connected to a rhythmical movement between spatial expansion and withdrawal. Our perception of the world is grounded in our spatial situatedness and works according to the principle of familiarity. One develops a habitually reciprocal relationship with a familiar environment, but by movement we are able to fight the inertia of habits that narrow down what we are able to perceive and consequently think of.

To delve deeper into an experience of space that does not fall clearly within any socially demarcated categories, the dissertation applies the concept of liminal space. The concept of liminality, originally developed within the field of anthropology, enables to grasp a type of “not” experience: a situation wherein existing social structures are dissolved and cultural frameworks are reopened. This is what happened when knowledge workers moved to conduct their work in an unfamiliar rural environment. Such a situation may be existentially challenging, but the absence of clear social norms and rules also enables the individual to reconnect with their affective, embodied experience and life rhythms as well as the concrete surrounding community. Thus, liminal situation can be highly creative, but it is simultaneously grounded in the experiences of the lived body. This manifested in the archipelago participants’ enhanced ability to calmly concentrate on what they were doing at a given moment and distance themselves from the less urgent external demands that dictated their work and life rhythms in the daily environment to a significant degree. The archipelago experiment reduced the experiences of fragmentation of work and enabled participants to own their time. Instead of living sequences of the fragmented present, the participants were directed towards a more authentic experience of time where the present moment was connected with past life experiences and future dreams. Some participants were even able to affectively relive some memorable key periods of their personal pasts which produced a happy sensation of continuity of life and career. As a sense of fragmentation and a personal loss of control over the whole of any work process seem to increasingly dominate knowledge work, opportunities to affectively own time in a way that illuminates the direction of one’s life course and career can be highly therapeutic and also transformative. In at least one case, the experiences during the short archipelago period facilitated a decision on a significant career change.

The liminality of the archipelago experiment affectively overlapped with the atmospheres of the structurally embedded everyday spaces that served as a background against which the liminal archipelago space was compared by the participants. The strength of affective sensations during the archipelago experiment was due to this extensive contrast of spaces. This dissertation suggests that mobile knowledge work may produce experiences of collisions between life-worlds that are key to a transformative liminal experience. Thus, to reach such a liminal experience, the external qualities of any given space taken in isolation (i.e., their style or beauty) may not be of primary importance. Rather, the contrast between different spaces as an experience of a liminal overlap between atmospheres is. A rural and natural space is the ultimate contrast to urban environments wherein communication networks are condensed but physical space is often scarce and competed over. An experience of the contrast between different spaces enables one to reach a perspective above the routinized mental frameworks, a perspective which has potential to initiate creative transformation.