From Nomadic Work to Nomadic Leisure Practice: a Study of Long-Term Bike Touring
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From nomadic work to nomadic leisure practice: A study of long-term bike touring PEDRO FERREIRA, IT-University of Copenhagen, Denmark KAREY HELMS, Department of Media Technology & Interaction Design, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden BARRY BROWN, Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University, Sweden AIRI LAMPINEN, Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University, Sweden Mobility has long been a central concern in research within the Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) community, particularly when it comes to work and how being on the move calls for reorganizing work practices. We expand this line of work with a focus on nomadic leisure practices. Based on interviews with eleven participants, we present a study that illuminates how digital technologies are used to shape and structure long-distance cycling. Our main analysis centers on bike touring as a nomadic leisure practice and on how it offers a radical departure from traditional modes of structuring work and life, and thus, complicates the relationship between work and leisure. We complement this with an account of managing the uncertainties of nomadicity by focusing on participants’ experiences with arranging overnighting and network hospitality. We offer this study, firstly, as one response to the call for more diversity in the empirical cases drawnuponin theorizing nomadic work and leisure practices, but more productively, as an opportunity to reflect upon the temporal and spatial logics of digital technologies and platforms and how they frame our attitudes towards the interplay between work and leisure. CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in collaborative and social com- puting. Additional Key Words and Phrases: Bike touring; nomadicity; tourism; network hospitality; work-life balance ACM Reference Format: Pedro Ferreira, Karey Helms, Barry Brown, and Airi Lampinen. 2019. From nomadic work to nomadic leisure practice: A study of long-term bike touring. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 3, CSCW, Article 111 (Novem- ber 2019), 20 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3359213 1 INTRODUCTION Mobility has long been a central concern in research within the Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) community, particularly when it comes to work and how being on the move calls for reorganizing work practices [6, 8, 10, 12, 13, 28]. Previous work has mainly considered mobility as discrete — albeit at times very frequent — events, such as having to travel regularly for work [14]. The moment of mobility itself has also been studied, for instance in the work of Perry et. Authors’ addresses: Pedro Ferreira, [email protected], IT-University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark; Karey Helms, [email protected], Department of Media Technology & Interaction Design, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden; Barry Brown, [email protected], Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden; Airi Lampinen, [email protected], Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice andthe 111 full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must behonored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]. © 2019 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. 2573-0142/2019/11-ART111 $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3359213 Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Vol. 3, No. CSCW, Article 111. Publication date: November 2019. 111:2 Pedro Ferreira et al. al. on travel down-time, such as waiting in airports [39]. While early writings presented a vision of a nomadic knowledge worker who can work ‘anytime, anywhere’, propelled by the promise of ubiquitous connectivity and the development of mobile devices and services [28, 29], recent empirical accounts paint richer pictures of mobility and nomadicity, illustrating that the boundaries between different spheres of life, including work, require complex and careful negotiation (e.g. [11, 48]). Within CSCW, accounts of nomadicity have largely focused on nomadic work practices (e.g. [15, 41, 43, 48]). Mobility in the context of leisure has received less attention, with some notable exceptions, namely in relation to tourism [4, 46]. We expand this line of work with a focus in this paper on nomadic leisure practices. Based on 16 in-depth, semi-structured, individual interviews with 11 participants with experience of long-term bike touring, we present a qualitative study that illuminates the relationship between leisure, work, and nomadicity, analyzing the role technology plays in how we orient to where and when work and leisure take place. We discuss how temporalities and spatialities of leisure, such as holiday making, are increasingly organized via different app logics, for instance with the rise of network hospitality services such as Airbnb and CouchSurfing [31, 35]. From Sharma’s work on ‘chronographies of power’ [45], to Gregg’s critique of ‘the productivity imperative’ [23] and the research of Mazmanian and colleagues [34] on ‘temporal logics’, prior literature examines the impacts of time on our experiencing of work as well as the role of technology design in shaping those impacts [50]. We further draw on tourism and leisure studies to illuminate how contemporary spaces of leisure, and specifically tourism, are increasingly collaboratively constructed [38, 51, 54], and how platforms play a crucial role in constructing those spaces [38, 54]. After situating our work in relation to prior literature, we set up our analysis with a description of bike touring as a nomadic leisure practice, focusing on its effortful, enjoyable, and collaborative facets. Our main analysis centers on how it offers a radical departure from traditional modes of structuring work and leisure, further complicating this relationship. It is worth noting that while the concept of work has multiple meanings within CSCW, in this paper, we use the term ‘work’ to refer to formalized, paid work and in some cases the pursuit of studies central to the participants’ professional identity. We complement this with an account of overnighting as a core tenet of nomadic leisure practices, its social dimensions, risks, and uncertainties. This study is intended as an empirical contribution in response to calls for more diverse case studies of nomadic cultures beyond work practices [43], while also adding to discussions on how platforms and technologies produce new spatialities and temporalities of nomadic work and leisure. 2 BACKGROUND We contextualize our study by reviewing research from two lines of work within and beyond CSCW. First, mobility and nomadic work practices have been a key aspect of inquiry into the changing workplace and the temporal organization of everyday lives. Second, we draw on tourism, hospitality, and mobility studies as the practices studied in these fields are central to bike touring. Here, we connect in particular to recent work on network hospitality — a key example of how digital technologies can enable nomadic tourism. 2.1 Nomadic work and its temporalities Within CSCW, the persistent vision of a nomadic knowledge worker who can work ‘anytime, anywhere’, was propelled by the promise of ubiquitous connectivity and the development of mobile devices and services [28, 29]. This vision has long been critiqued as a naïve, technology-centered understanding of mobile work, starting with early investigations of nomadic work practices, including but not limited to micro-mobility and the mobility of artefacts [33], place-making [6, 39, 41], planful opportunism [39], and the infrastructure of nomadic work [47], that is, the range Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Vol. 3, No. CSCW, Article 111. Publication date: November 2019. From nomadic work to nomadic leisure practice 111:3 of situated practices to recreate the mobile office. More broadly, glamorous narratives of being able to work anywhere [13], commonly associated with promises of individual empowerment and flexibility, are now increasingly questioned [19]. Workers may be offered the possibility to work full-time from home [21], but this flexibility is not equally desirable for all, and maybean unwanted burden for some. Prior work has illustrated how current politics around flexible work arrangements (e.g. freelance work, independent contracting, and working from home policies) may nurture a tendency to put work at the center, sometimes at the expense of important forms of personal fulfillment [2, 21]. Over the years, the variety of mobile apps and devices, along with the pervasiveness of cloud services has turned the nomadic practices encompassed in moving resources across locations into an everyday occurrence for many workers [42]. However, the fact that mobility is now technologically easier to accomplish does not mean it is always easy. Digital nomadicity borrows from a time management culture designed with certain assumptions regarding temporal logics. Here, we draw upon Mazmanian and colleagues’ notion of temporal logics as "the socially legitimated, shared assumptions about time that are embedded in institutional