The contemporary period has witnessed the rapid evolution in a wide range of mobile technology. This book charts the profound implications these technological changes have for workers and business organizations. From an organizational point of view they have the potential to transform the nature of organizations, through allowing workers to be increasingly mobile. From the perspective of workers these changes have the potential to impact on their work-related communications, how they manage the increasingly blurred public-private divide, and the nature of the home-work boundary. These chapters provide a detailed insight into these issues through bringing together an international collection of contemporary studies and analysis and taking a critical perspective towards some of the advertised myths regarding mobile technology usage. Issues covered include: Travel and changing nature of spatial mobility patterns. Work-Space and Place and the ‘leaking’ out of organizations into more public domains. Mobile Work Practices including detailed and heterogeneous case studies. Home-work dynamics and the changing nature of the home-work boundary. Implications for Public Policy

A unique perspective of an evolved role for company leadership Based on the findings of an extensive research project that surveyed more than 5,500 enterprise employees and functional decision makers across the United States and China, Transforming Business: Big Data, Mobility and Globalization explores the influence of technology in the workplace and the implications to company culture, functional responsibilities and competitive advantage. This in-depth analysis illuminates emerging technological trends, the changing workforce, and the shifting face of business and industry while offering prescriptive guidance to leaders. Addresses how new technology trends - including mobility, cloud, big data and collaboration - are fundamentally changing the way work is conducted and how company leadership can tap into these trends to affect positive cultural reform Examines how the introduction of new technologies and the emergence of new business models are shifting traditional organizational roles, including HR, marketing, finance, and IT Takes an in-depth look at how the next-generation of top talent, represented by college students at the top universities, view their future workplace environment and how technology can become a meaningful magnet for recruitment and retention Zeroes in on how the integration of technology into the workplace differs between the United States and China and the implications to the global marketplace What emerges from this book is an evolved role for company leadership, one of significant strategic value as cultural stewards capable of generating sustainable advantage for their companies in the most competitive market witnessed in decades.

Winner of the 2018 CCCC Technical and Scientific Communication Award in the category of Best Book in Technical or Scientific Communication Responding to the effects of human mobility and crises such as depleting oil supplies, Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder turns specifically to automobility, a term used to describe the kinds of mobility afforded by autonomous, automobile-based movement technologies and their ramifications. Thus far, few studies in technical communication have explored the development of mobility technologies, the immense power that highly structured, environmentally significant systems have in the world, or the human-machine interactions that take place in such activities. Applying kinaesthetic rhetoric, a rhetoric that is sensitive to and developed from the mobile, material context of these technologies, Pflugfelder looks at transportation projects such as electric taxi cabs from the turn of the century to modern day, open-source vehicle projects, and a large case study of an autonomous, electric pod car network that ultimately failed. Kinaesthetic rhetoric illuminates how mobility technologies have always been persuasive wherever and whenever linguistic symbol systems and material interactions enroll us, often unconsciously, into regimes of movement and ways of experiencing the world. As Pflugfelder shows, mobility technologies involve networks of sustained arguments that are as durable as the bonds between the actors in their networks.

There are currently 3.5 billion mobile phones in the world and mobile information technologies permeate all aspects of life. This book explores how mobile technologies and information work shape each other. Most writings do not consider how information work increasingly relies on mobile services; this book seeks to address this imbalance.

Throughout the history of business employees had to adapt to managers and managers had to adapt to organizations. In the future this is reversed with managers and organizations adapting to employees. This means that in order to succeed and thrive organizations must rethink and challenge everything they know about work. The demographics of employees are changing and so are employee expectations, values, attitudes, and styles of working. Conventional management models must be replaced with leadership approaches adapted to the future employee. Organizations must also rethink their traditional structure, how they empower employees, and what they need to do to remain competitive in a rapidly changing world. This is a book about how employees of the future will work, how managers will lead, and what organizations of the future will look like. The Future of Work will help you: Stay ahead of the competition Create better leaders Tap into the freelancer economy Attract and retain top talent Rethink management Structure effective teams Embrace flexible work environments Adapt to the changing workforce Build the organization of the future And more The book features uncommon examples and easy to understand concepts which will challenge and inspire you to work differently.

Why the United States lags behind other industrialized countries in sharing the benefits of innovation with workers and how we can remedy the problem. The United States has too many low-quality, low-wage jobs. Every country has its share, but those in the United States are especially poorly paid and often without benefits. Meanwhile, overall productivity increases steadily and new technology has transformed large parts of the economy, enhancing the skills and paychecks of higher paid knowledge workers. What’s wrong with this picture? Why have so many workers benefited so little from decades of growth? The Work of the Future shows that technology is neither the problem nor the solution. We can build better jobs if we create institutions that leverage technological innovation and also support workers though long cycles of technological transformation. Building on findings from the multiyear MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future, the book argues that we must foster institutional innovations that complement technological change. Skills programs that emphasize work-based and hybrid learning (in person and online), for example, empower workers to become and remain productive in a continuously evolving workplace. Industries fueled by new technology that augments workers can supply good jobs, and federal investment in R&D can help make these industries worker-friendly. We must act to ensure that the labor market of the future offers benefits, opportunity, and a measure of economic security to all.

Previously published in the journal 'Information knowledge systems management' 7, 1-2 (2008), ISSN 1389-1995.