@article{b906ba45be67437390448075a732281f,
title = "Flexible Turtles and Elastic Octopi: Exploring Agile Practice in Knowledge Work",
abstract = "This paper takes as its starting place the rich context of many knowledge workers today—highly distributed, increasing project focused, typically atypical days, infrastructural—and attempts to push past extant descriptions of their practices as {\textquoteleft}flexible{\textquoteright}. Using empirical data informed by a practice theory lens, we expand the understanding of flexibility with regard to work by augmenting how worker disposition, as well as the ability to engage with agility in dynamic circumstances, should be considered as a factor when examining and designing for this population. We make several contributions of interest to the wider CSCW community. First, we distinguish between those who showcase flexible practices and those who proactively orient around flexibility. We call this second group {\textquoteleft}elastic workers{\textquoteright}. Second, we raise new questions for us as scholars and designers keen to exploit the conceptual and pragmatic intersection of technology and work. These questions create opportunities to explore different methods for understanding complex phenomena such as flexibility, as well as understanding how we might design for this phenomenon with more foresight in the future.",
keywords = "Elastic, Flexible work, Future of work, Infrastructure, Knowledge work, Practice, Worker",
author = "Ingrid Erickson and Deepti Menezes and Raghav Raheja and Thanushree Shetty",
note = "Funding Information: We would like to acknowledge the generosity of our interviewees in sharing their stories; prior collaborators, Mohammad Jarrahi and Steve Sawyer, for their analytical contributions; and the National Science Foundation for their generous support of this research. Funding Information: The research presented herein is part of a larger initiative to understand how modern-day knowledge workers, in their complexity as described at the beginning of this paper, encounter and interact with digital infrastructures. The project was initially funded by an exploratory grant from the United States National Science Foundation in 2013; data collection, primarily in the form of interviews, commenced in 2014 and was completed in 2016. Several products from this research have been previously shared at conferences or published, all emphasizing how workers create digital assemblages and engage in infrastructuring practices (Jarrahi et al. 2019; Erickson and Jarrahi 2016. Several papers will be forthcoming describing the competencies that workers need to engage in these activities. As the work has moved on, the first author has been oriented toward more reflexive considerations, such as questions of methodology (Erickson, 2017) as well as the topic of the current paper, namely the meaning(s) embedded in the concept of flexibility. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2019, The Author(s).",
year = "2019",
month = jun,
day = "15",
doi = "10.1007/s10606-019-09360-1",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "28",
pages = "627--653",
journal = "Computer Supported Cooperative Work",
issn = "0925-9724",
publisher = "Springer Netherlands",
number = "3-4",
}