The assetisation of digital workplaces

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Lizzie Richardson
• Subject Area: Human Geography
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 534739267

How is the flexibility of digital workplaces being turned into an asset? This project examines the hypothesis that in the digital economy, it is no longer solely space as a geometric unit but spatio-temporal flexibility that is a basis for asset formation. It does this through a focus on digital workplaces. Digital work is increasingly characterised by spatially flexible work arrangements. This applies to traditional office workplaces as well as to the home office or delivery services. Workspace is therefore increasingly being valued on the basis of its capacity to act as an infrastructure for flexible work. It is here that assetisation processes play a role, recursively driving workplace flexibility through an interplay with digital technologies. Assetisation involves: (1) value creation through ownership of elements of an infrastructure that allows work (2) which is achieved through the valuation of future revenues from that ownership (3) that in turn materially and discursively shapes the work composing the initial workplace infrastructure. To investigate workplace assetisation, the project is organised around two different cases of flexible digital workplaces. One focuses on office space in London and Frankfurt to consider assetisation in commercial real estate, where existing business models foregrounding spatial flexibility have been exaggerated during the pandemic. The other focuses on assetisation in grocery delivery through digital platforms in London and Berlin. Grocery delivery through digital platforms also increased during the pandemic, including the emergence of new companies offering the on-demand delivery of groceries in urban areas. Through ethnographic methods comprising interviews, participant observation and textual analysis in an international team, the project aims to make an empirical contribution to understanding the current reshaping of the relationship between digital workplaces, infrastructure and assetisation. It will be shown how spatial flexibility, rather than space, becomes an asset through infrastructuralisation and that this assetisation in turn transforms the discursive and material conditions of work. In sum the project provides a fundamental understanding of one of the spatial dimensions of digitalisation.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: United Kingdom
• Cooperation Partner: Professorin Dr. Tatiana Thieme