Corporate smart phones: professionals' conscious engagement in escalating work connectivity

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12022
• Author: Ana Heloisa Lemos,Kaspar Villadsen,Flávia Cavazotte
• Published date: 01 March 2014
• Date: 01 March 2014

Corporate smart phones: professionals’

conscious engagement in escalating

work connectivity

Flávia Cavazotte, Ana Heloisa Lemos and

Kaspar Villadsen

This article explores how the adoption of company sponsored

smart phones inflicts upon the lives of professionals. Drawing

upon qualitative interviews at a law firm in Brazil, the experi-

ences of new smart phone users are reported upon in detail.

Increased accessibility, accuracy and speed in exchanges gave

the users a sense of autonomy and flexibility. However, the

technology also helped to intensify the organisation’s hold on

employees outside of regular working hours, reaching into new

settings, time slots and social contexts. Employees expressed

concerns regarding demands from superiors that negatively

affected their private spheres, yet many of them paradoxically

requested more efficient smart phone connectivity. The article

focuses on the justifications, the different narrative strategies,

employed by professionals for their conscious engagement in

escalating work connectivity. It is suggested that these justifi-

cations display users’ attempt to ‘dis-identify’ with the role

and practice they perform.

Flávia Cavazotte is Associate Professor of Management and Research Director at the School of

Business of Pontifícia Universidade Católicado Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio). She received her PhD degree

in Business Administrationfrom Virginia Commonwealth University.She presently serves the editorial

board of the Brazilian Administration Review (BAR), and the Division of Human Resources and Work

Relations of the Brazilian Academy of Management (ANPAD). Cavazotte has published articles in

periodicals such as The Leadership Quarterly (LQ), Organizational Research Methods (ORM) and Cross-

Cultural Research (CCR). Her current research interests include organizationalleadership, identification

and citizenship behaviors; diversity and cooperation;and social issues of IT development and use. Ana

Heloisa Lemos is Associate Professor of Management and Research Director at the School of Business

of Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio). She received her PhD degree in

Sociology from Instituto Universitário de Pesquisas do Rio de Janeiro (The University Research Insti-

tute of Rio de Janeiro). Lemos is currently a member of the Scientific Committee of the Division of

Human Resources and Work Relations of the BrazilianAcademy of Management (ANPAD). She has

published articles in a range of Brazilian journals, including Brazilian Business Review,Organizações &

Sociedade, and Revista de Administração Contemporânea. Her current research interests include career, the

meaning of work, labor relations and social issues associated with IT development and usage. Kaspar

Villadsen is Associate Professor and Director of the PhD Program at Department of Management,

Politics and Philosophy,Copenhagen Business School. He holds a PhD in Sociology from the University

of Copenhagen. Villadsen’s current research centers on the concept of the state and ‘state phobia’ in

Michel Foucault and his successors’ work. He has a forthcoming book on this subject (with Mitchell

Dean) on Stanford University Press. Villadsen has published extensivelydrawing upon concepts from

Foucault and post-structural theory for the studyof social policy, health, welfare provision and critical

issues in the world of contemporary management. His work has been published in journals such as

Constellations,Culture and Organization,Public Management Review, and Social Theory and Health.

New Technology, Work and Employment 29:1

ISSN 0268-1072

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd72 New Technology, Work and Employment

Keywords: smart phones, work/life balance, work intensifica-

tion, dis-identification, Zizek, control, Brazil.

Introduction

This article focuses on the use of smart phones provided to professionals by their

employer. It thus contributes to an emerging, although still relatively limited, research

domain on employees’ use of company sponsored mobile communication technology

(Gant and Kiesler, 2001; Middleton, 2007; Mazmanian et al., 2013; Reis de Araujo and

Villadsen, 2013). Although such technologies are advertised with the promise of less

time spent at work, their adoption often results in a considerable increase in working

hours (Gant and Kiesler, 2001; Hislop and Axtell, 2011). Our goal is to better under-

stand how the use of corporate smart phones is affecting professionalsas they perform

their work, paying particular attention to critical issues of work intensification, and

new forms of surveillance through networks of communication and data exchange. We

also examine how employees reflect upon their own behaviours and justify how they

use mobile devices.

This study atteststo the highly ambiguous role played by communication technology

at workplaces. Smart phones are generally viewed by users as tools for achieving

greater personal freedom and space for manoeuvre. Their reported benefits include

enhanced possibilities of connectivity, rapid access to information, and effective data

storage and transfer (Davis, 2002; Jarvenpaa, 2005). So far, research on the subject

documents (perhaps surprisingly) little resistance from employees against the intro-

duction of new communication technologies at workplaces. The tendency is rather

that employees embrace the technologies or take an ambivalent stance on them

(Mazmanian et al., 2013), but research that explore employees’ responses in detail is

scarce (Middleton, 2007; Hislop and Axtell, 2011). In this article, we foreground the

self-justifications given by professionals who voluntarily take part in a process of

escalating work-related connectivity. By self-justification, we mean the reasons, justi-

fications and critical reflections employees express in relation to their use of commu-

nication technology for work purposes. In the next section, we discuss recent research

on the ambiguous aspects of this new technology and further elaborate and specify our

research questions.

Computational mobility and work intensification

A key critical claim in the emerging literature on employees’ technology use is that the

novel communication technology facilitates a process of work intensification by allow-

ing work communication and task solving to take place during times usually devoted

to private activities (Burke and Fiskenbaun, 2009; Hislop and Axtell, 2011). It has been

observed that the use of portable communication tools means that workers are always

‘on-call’ in relation to their superiors and colleagues who expect fast response and

problem solving, even during employees’ time off. These effects are held to be most

pronounced among knowledge workers and ‘symbolic analysts’ (Reich, 1994). These

professionals perform knowledge intensive work, enjoy a relative degree of autonomy

and have flexible working arrangements. This study focuses precisely on these profes-

sionals, and for this reason, we restrict our discussion to a few recent studies of such

professionals’ use of communicationtechnology, namely, the work by Middleton (2007)

and Mazmanian et al. (2006; 2013).

A key finding in these studies is that professionals whose activitiesrequire continual

coordination among colleagues, clients and associates take a predominantly positive

attitude to new communication technologies. They largely embrace the devices while

they nevertheless acknowledge that this embrace is accompanied by escalating com-

munication patternsand work activity encroaching upon the private sphere. The reason

why the users conceive the benefits of adopting the technologies to outweigh the

negative effects revolves around perceptions of increased autonomy, control and the

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Professionals in escalating work connectivity 73