Introduction

Two relatively recent ongoing, and arguably significant ways in which work has been changing, both of which began to become visible and significant trends from the mid-1990s onwards, are first, the extent to which work is carried out in locations beyond the home and the workplace, and the increasing levels of spatial mobility required of workers, and second, the rapid evolution in a wide range of mobile information and communication technologies and their increasingly widespread use by workers. For example, mobile communication technologies such as mobile phones have developed enormously, and the start of the twenty-first century witnessed the development of mobile email devices such as BlackBerries. Personal and mobile computer technologies have also developed enormously, with laptops becoming increasingly more powerful, more portable, and more able to connect to the internet from diverse locations (through wifi). The central focus of the chapters in this edited collection is on the many and diverse ways in which these two trends have combined to change work practices and the character of the places in which work is carried out.