ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the journey of one organizational scholar who moved from studying the “products” of place to the “practices” of place as exemplified by contemporary mobile knowledge workers. While social media tools like Twitter and Flickr provide platforms for individuals to conceptualize and engage with the concept of place anew, moving through space as a mobile worker forces a direct engagement with places via their embedded infrastructures, implicit social norms, and other hidden boundaries and characteristics. The key insight of the chapter is that much of what counts for professional and organizational praxis today cannot be understood without the collection and analysis of trace data. Observable practices will always be important to study as will digital artifacts, but the combination of the two increasingly requires a mixed methodological approach. This is particularly true when confronting the challenge of understanding modern forms of work. We inhabit spaces as workers, but our work is not confined to those spaces – it comes and goes and we need to understand how, why, and when this happens and, even more importantly, what this mobile set of activities truly comprises.
