2017 Volume 6 Issue 1 Pages 31-37
We attempt to overcome the issue of telework research, the limitation of the functionalism perspective, by re-conceptualizing telework as a process of spatial organizing. The previous telework research has assumed telework as a performance program which organizations ‘introduce.’ By virtue of the assumption, the reality of the emerging mechanism under the physical structures in which people are spatially apart from each other has been overlooked. This study argues telework understood as a service innovation through taking sociomateriality into consideration, rather than taking no account of the differences of spaces. In the case of a satellite office in Shirahama established by a web conference system company in Tokyo, we analyze the process of routinization involving heterogeneous actors with Actor-network Theory as a methodology. The result shows that the materiality of the ICT and the Shirahama office building had an affordance for spatial organizing; the routinization of ‘demonstration of the web conference system’. Besides, the new routine connected the independent actor-networks; the landscape of Shirahama and client meetings, and developed into an innovative organizational marketing technique. The previous telework research ironically tended to be indifferent about time and spaces. However, it would allow for telework as a service innovation to look at the special organizing process from the perspective of organizational affordance.
