tele- and mobile work

I was interested in papers about tele-work, but for some reason, I encountered more papers about mobile work. Although both are concerned with new working practices done outside of the traditional working places, they are certainly represents different dimensions of the relationship between work and space: the former has something to do with stability and mobility, while the latter is more about the degree of isolation or integration between work and life, and self and others. They provide cases to examine these dimensions when we discuss the relationship between work, space, life, and others.

If the work is mobile, like traveling all over the places to give services, such as sales persons, delivery persons, or consultants, then the person has to be mobile. There are also different degrees of mobility in terms of spatial and temporal dimensions: local/remote/global mobile; short term/long term moble(delivery vs. customer site development).

Work can be done in a variety of places, traditional office as the first place, customer site as the second and half place, home as the second place, coffee house as the third place, and tranportation as the forth place. If the work is conducted at home, the first thing coming up is how the boundary between work and life is managed, and how the isolation is dealt with. If the work is conducted at a customer site, how the we can connect to the infrastructure, what spatial arrangement can we occupy seems questionable. If the work is conducted in a third place, it is good balance between isolation and sociability, and it is more relaxing. If the work is conducted at the forth space, the network connection, the attention management, the environment management are all issues we need to be concerned about.