The International Journal of Human Resource

Management

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Technology and the hybrid workplace: the

affective living of IT-enabled space

Fabio James Petani & Jeanne Mengis

To cite this article: Fabio James Petani & Jeanne Mengis (2021): Technology and the hybrid
workplace: the affective living of IT-enabled space, The International Journal of Human
Resource Management, DOI: 10.1080/09585192.2021.1998186

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The International Journal of Human Resource Management
https://doi.org/10.1080/09585192.2021.1998186

Technology and the hybrid workplace: the affective

living of IT-enabled space
Fabio James Petania and Jeanne Mengisb,c
a
INSEEC Grande Ecole, OMNES Education, Lyon, France; bFaculty of Communication, Culture and
Society, Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), Lugano, Switzerland; cWarwick Business School,
University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Information technology (IT) and space are sociomaterial Human Resource
dimensions of organizations that Human Resource Management (HRM);
Management (HRM) often take for granted, discounting how Information Technology
(IT);
workers enact them in practice. With digital technologies
organizational space;
rapidly changing the spaces of work, this paper proposes a sociomateriality;
framework for HRM to appreciate the role of the lived, affec- IT-enabled space;
tive experience of IT-enabled (physical and virtual) hybrid affectivity;
workspaces. We integrate the information systems (IS) liter- physical and virtual
ature on sociomaterial practices and insights on organiza- space as designed;
tional space to suggest implications for HRM practice and physical and virtual
pathways for future research on how virtual and physical space as lived;
spaces are related and lived in the emergence of new hybrid hybrid work;
hybrid workspace
workplaces and practices.

1.  Introduction
The recent rearrangements of the spatial and technological conditions
of work – with telework, work-from-anywhere (Choudhury, 2020), and
Human Resource Management (HRM) adapting to the digital economy
(Donnelly & Johns, 2021) – will make ‘hybrid work’ and ‘hybrid work-
spaces’ an important feature of the post-pandemic world (Gratton, 2021).
Hybrid workspaces are understood as ‘multiply located’ (Halford, 2005,
p. 22), with people working more ‘flexibly’ thanks to IT, splitting their
time across different places (e.g. home, corporate offices, coworking
spaces). In this paper, we extend the understanding of hybrid workspaces
and argue that technology is not only a means for such new ways of
working, but that it further increases the multiple locatedness of

CONTACT Fabio James Petani fjpetani@inseec.com INSEEC Grande Ecole, OMNES Education, 24 rue
de l’université, Lyon 69007, France
© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 F. J. PETANI AND J. MENGIS

workspaces, as work is simultaneously – though to different degrees –

located both virtually and physically.
Human Resource Management (HRM) is starting to embrace a
spatio-relational perspective on the emerging reconfigurations of digital
work, arguing that ‘the claim that digitisation will lead to the complete
de-contextualisation of work and HRM is inherently flawed’ (Donnelly
& Johns, 2021, p. 85) and inviting us to rebalance a firm-centric view
of work to account for the experiences of workers outside firm bound-
aries. Indeed, IT-enabled, hybrid spaces pose important challenges to
HRM, not only for how workers live the boundaries between private
and work spaces (Halford, 2005), but also for how they affectively
experience the multiple locatedness of hybrid spaces, including how
boundaries run between digital and physical IT-enabled spaces. The
affective living of hybrid space is of practical relevance, for example,
when emplyoees move from one meeting space to another, when they
are asked to develop a collective focus on a topic while being online,
but concomitantly at different physical locations, when virtual work
leads to perceive a proximity with distant colleagues (Wilson et  al.,
2008), or when workers resist physical workspaces designed for seren-
dipity and collaboration (Irving et  al., 2020).
When aiming to foreground how such experiences of hybrid space
arise at the intersection of multiply located physical and virtual spaces,
we need to conceptualize better how IT and the physical space jointly
contribute to differently lived experiences of the workplace. Virtual and
physical spaces often differ in practice from how HRM conceives them
to be. A virtual space may be simultaneously practiced and lived dif-
ferently by workers in different places, or even by the same workers in
different spatiotemporally and emotionally situated contexts (Waizenegger
et  al., 2020). For example, the same IT-enabled virtual videoconferencing
space is experienced with different emotions when practiced from home,
from the office, while traveling, whether alone or sharing the same more
or less silent (open) space (Banbury & Berry, 2005), at different times
of the day, or from different digital devices (e.g. pc, laptop, mobile
phone). Yet, HRM has so far developed only a limited understanding
of how employees experience IT-enabled, hybrid workspaces.
Firstly, the multiple hybridity of practicing and living IT-enabled space
is not grasped by HRM’s often decontextualized focus on IT adoption
and its consequences (Bondarouk & Ruël, 2009; Bondarouk et  al., 2017b;
Ruël et  al., 2007; Strohmeier, 2009). In particular, some research in
e-HRM runs the risk of technological determinism (cp. Ellmer & Reichel,
2018), when claiming that ‘technology delivers results (albeit sometimes
mixed) independently from how people appropriate it’ (Bondarouk et  al.,
2017a, p. 1352). Such a position stands in explicit contrast to
 The International Journal of Human Resource Management 3

‘sociomaterial’ research in information systems (IS), interested in how

people enact IT in their everyday work (Orlikowski, 2007), an approach
which sees people, work and technology as inseparable in practice
(Orlikowski & Scott, 2008). The IS literature on sociomateriality greatly
developed the notion of affordances understood as ‘action possibilities
and opportunities’ (Faraj & Azad, 2012, 238), which emerge in work
practices from the organizational interaction between people and IT
material infrastructures (Carlile et  al., 2013; Lindberg & Lyytinen, 2013).
We here embrace an understanding of sociomateriality (and further,
affordances) in line with the philosophic tradition of agentic realism
(Leonardi, 2013), a common philosophical stance in sociomateriality
research, besides critical realism (Leonardi, 2013; Volkoff & Strong, 2013).1
Secondly, HRM literature tends to undertheorize how IT and space
reshape the way workers practice and experience their workplace. Yet
physical and virtual environments influence new workplace experiences
(Gruber et  al., 2015, p. 4) and their affordances, and there is a need to
better understand how people appropriate and live IT-enabled work-
spaces. Practitioners grasp possibilities for action (i.e. affordances) dif-
ferently according to where they are, for example we know that informal
gathering spaces favor interaction practices (Fayard & Weeks, 2007;
Furnari, 2014), and that virtual interactions may enable a paradoxical
perception of proximity at a distance (O’Leary et  al., 2014). In organi-
zational research, many scholars have drawn on Henri Lefebvre (1991)
to study how organizational spaces are not merely designed to some
strategic ends, but are practiced and lived in everyday work (Dale, 2005;
Dale & Burrell, 2008; De Vaujany & Mitev, 2013; Kingma et  al., 2018).
Lefebvre’s work is particularly useful in understanding the interactions
between how we design, use and affectively live spatial arrangements.
As technology can expand or collapse the perception of organizational
spaces (Mukherjee, 2021), we suggest that HRM can better understand
how employees experience the IT-enabled workspace by appreciating,
on the one hand, the sociomaterial practices (Orlikowski, 2007) through
which workers enact their IT-enabled workspaces and, on the other,
how they affectively live them (Lefebvre, 1991). We therefore propose
to integrate selected insights from sociomaterial studies of technology
and from the literature on organizational space, in order to go beyond
the intentions encoded in material artifacts (Jarzabkowski & Pinch, 2013)
and space as designed (Berti et  al., 2017), and contribute a way for
HRM to conceptualize IT-enabled hybrid spaces as lived in everyday
work practices. Consequently, we ask:

How can HRM practice and theory address IT-enabled hybrid workplaces ‘as
lived’?
4 F. J. PETANI AND J. MENGIS

We answer this question by theorizing about 1) how contemporary

workplaces are never only virtual, but are affectively experienced in the
multiple interactions between their physical and digital locatedness; 2)
how a focus on sociomaterial practices may help to explain how
IT-enabled workplaces take on specific affordances in everyday work;
and 3) how a Lefebvrian understanding of space may help to develop
an affective and temporal sensitivity for how IT-enabled space is
practiced.
In the following, after reviewing selected concepts from the literature
on sociomateriality and space theory (sections 2.1 and 2.2), we develop
an integrated framework to help HRM conceptualize IT-enabled hybrid
workplaces better, and explore emerging HRM practical challenges related
to how these spaces are lived (section 3). We close the paper by out-
lining the limitations and further steps to the contributions our frame-
work suggests for HRM (section 4).

2.  How HRM may study the living of IT-enabled spaces via
sociomaterial and Lefebvrian  lenses

2.1.  A sociomaterial view of IT-enabled space: from fixed features to

evolving affordances in practice

A recent definition in HRM contends that IT ‘is a physical entity (hard-

ware, software and communication network infrastructure) that is sep-
arate from individuals but at the same time the physical technology is
nothing without individuals using it in organizational tasks’ (Marler &
Parry, 2016, p. 2234, emphasis added). Such a view recognizes that IT
becomes meaningful through people’s use, but falls short of fully appre-
ciating the inseparable entanglement of the social and material (hence
sociomaterial) dimensions of technology. Sociomateriality sees IT both
as a socially constructed and an objective reality (Leonardi & Barley,
2010), thus avoiding the Scylla of technological determinism (where IT
causes effects independently of users), and the Charybdis of social rel-
ativism (where technology is nothing without users). In short, the dichot-
omy between social and material is counterproductive for our study
aims, and an established sociomaterial approach (applicable beyond IT)
argues that ‘the social and the material are considered to be inextricably
related – there is no social that is not also material, and no material
that is not also social’ (Orlikowski, 2007, p. 1437). Employees and IT
are not separate agents, but their agency results from their practical
interaction (Orlikowski, 2007; Orlikowski & Scott, 2008). Therefore the
relational ontology of a sociomaterial view of IT (Orlikowski, 2007)
 The International Journal of Human Resource Management 5

allows HRM to overcome the widespread analytical dichotomy of tech-

nological determinism and social constructivism and to better understand
the role of technology in organizations.
Another important aspect of the sociomaterial perspective is a broader
notion of materiality, which includes intangible qualities of IT (e.g.
software), helping us to appreciate that digital applications reveal benefits
and burdens, whether they are physically present and visible, or they
materialize in digital practices (Leonardi, 2010) and virtual IT-enabled
spaces. Materiality is all that matters to users (Carlile et  al., 2013) in
accomplishing their tasks, so it does not indicate just the tangible,
physical matter of an artifact’s materials (Leonardi, 2010), but its prac-
tical manifestation (materialization) and pertinent relevance. In e-HRM,
for instance, new IT features may not be ‘material’ (i.e. of practical use)
to the purposes of the targeted line-managers and employees, who may
perceive irritation, rather than innovation (Ruël et  al., 2004), such that
IT may fail to provide the designed affordance. A point in case is Open
Opportunities, a digital platform that served as a market for temporary
assignments in the US federal government. While it ‘materially’ enabled
a liminal space, where employees could stretch and craft their skills
beyond their jobs, this alternative gig work sometimes met the resistance
of conventional work arrangements (Rogiers et  al., 2021), as supervisors
were uncomfortable with their best employees putting time and energy
elsewhere. The example illustrates that the IT-enabled action possibility
does not depend on the material technical infrastructure alone, but that
outcomes depend also on the sociomaterial context of employees’ work
practices.
Sociomateriality, in fact, indicates the ‘enactment of a particular set
of activities that meld materiality with institutions, norms and discourses
and all other phenomena we define as “social”’ (Leonardi, 2010). A
sociomaterial approach addresses ‘the situated conditions of technology
use’ (Ellmer & Reichel, 2018, p. 270), and thus can respond to HRM’s
warnings that technology may risk losing sight of the employee (Stone
& Dulebohn, 2013; Stone et  al., 2015). Sociomateriality can provide
HRM with a relational focus on how people, norms and technologies
play out in work practices. HRM increasingly confronts and uses new
IT-enabled evaluations, like screening social media content of job appli-
cants, a sociomaterial practice which raises various (ethical and legal)
concerns over how recruiters (mis)use such data (Jeske & Shultz, 2016).
HRM has started to approach employees’ use of IT from a sociomaterial
perspective and research on in-house microblogging tools or e-HRM
applications (Bos-Nehles et  al., 2019; Hauptmann & Steger, 2013), fore-
grounds evolving affordances and constraints, showing that IT requires
managing the benefits and burdens emerging from use practices.
6 F. J. PETANI AND J. MENGIS

This brings us to the central notion of affordances of the sociomaterial

agenda. Affordances, or action possibilities are relational sociomaterial
properties (Jarzabkowski & Pinch, 2013) that come to matter to users
in practice (Carlile et  al., 2013), so the results IT delivers do not tran-
scend people’s appropriation (Bondarouk et  al., 2017a, p. 1352), but
emerge as users interact with a continuously changing IT.
‘An object has materiality because it conveys affordances, not because
it is solid. As the affordances create action possibilities, the object
impinges on the world, and its implication in activities makes its mate-
riality real, whether solid or not. Hence, software code has materiality
since it affords certain actions. Consequently, as code changes, affor-
dances will change’ (Lindberg & Lyytinen, 2013, p. 47).
Affordances are not stable. Objective as action possibilities may be
in the abstract intention that designed them, they are not independent
from how they are subjectively perceived and enacted in practice. For
instance, some applications design action possibilities that greatly exceed
the few functions adopted in practice by practitioners, as Faraj and
Azad (2012) show in reference to the many unutilized functionalities
of Word processors. In other cases, how practitioners use IT may lead
to re-design an expanded, initially unintended set of use possibilities.
As such, IT affordances vary and change over space and time, according
also to the subjective situations in which practioners enact and experi-
ence a technologically enabled possibility.
HRM may look at where, when and how IT enables certain work-
places. For example, organizational identities become increasingly hybrid,
constituted by both the interactions between organizational members in
physical space, and by non-member interactions in virtual spaces like
Twitter (Albu & Etter, 2016). At the same time, the affordances of social
media are contradictory (Majchrzak et  al., 2013). We suggest that how
IT enables work activities is contingent on the variety of hybrid work
experiences that users live over time in (and across) different workplaces.
As a study of how disabled bodies experience IT over time and space
clarifies: ‘the “affordances” of technological objects are (…) not reducible
to their material constitution but are inextricably bound up with specific,
historically situated modes of engagement and ways of life’ (Bloomfield
et  al., 2010, p. 415).
To better understand how these lived engagements relate to affor-
dances of IT-enabled physical and virtual workplaces, we draw insights
from space theory – in particular from Lefebvre’s spatial triad – which
can foreground not only the design and practice, but also the lived,
emotional dimension, through which users experience IT-enabled work-
spaces over time, which is found to be missing in sociomateriality lit-
erature (Ciborra & Willcocks, 2006; Stein et  al., 2014).
 The International Journal of Human Resource Management 7

2.2.  Lefebvre’s threefold production of space: from a fixed context of

work to an everyday becoming of affectively lived workplaces

Space is a promising frontier for HRM (Baldry, 1999; Callahan, 2013).

In recent years, organization and management studies have shown grow-
ing interest in understanding space (Beyes & Holt, 2020; Stephenson
et  al., 2020; Weinfurtner & Seidl, 2019), and its role for issues relevant
to HRM, such as employee control (Dale, 2005), identity regulation
(Wasserman & Frenkel, 2011), work relationships (Khazanchi et  al.,
2018), or transparence, privacy and organizational learning (Bernstein,
2017; Rowe, 2015). Particularly influential in the study of space is the
work of sociologist Henri Lefebvre, who has helped to grasp the his-
torical power and affective dynamics involved in space production
(Lefebvre, 1991; Kingma et  al., 2018). For Lefebvre, ‘spatial organization
is not about space; at least, not space as commonsensically distinguished
from place, time, technology, artifacts and the body. […] [S]pace is all
this together’ (Kingma et  al., 2018, p. 309). As such, workspaces result
from organizational, sociomaterial and political processes that integrate
and exploit physical and digital affordances (Elsbach & Pratt, 2007;
Fayard, 2012; Husted & Plesner, 2017). In particular, Lefebvre’s spatial
triad (1991) of perceived, conceived and lived space allows us to appre-
ciate not only the importance of everyday spatial practices vis-à-vis the
way space has been planned (i.e. including the design of its IT features)
– similar to a sociomaterial reading – but also to grasp the affectively
lived appropriations of space over time.
In the spatial triad, Lefebvre (1991) firstly sheds light on conceived
space or representations of space, which ‘are spaces as planned and
executed by planners, designers, architects and engineers and (…) we
could add managers. These are the deliberate constructions of space
that embody certain conceptualisations (e.g. functionality, control) in
materialised form’ (Dale & Burrell, 2008, p. 9). This space is conceived
through expert representations (e.g. architectural plans), which defy
judgment by actors who lack a specific technical (professional) knowl-
edge, and is thus seen as a technocratic form of political control. In
fact, Lefebvre (1991, p. 39) clarifies that conceived space is the ‘dominant
space in any society (or mode of production)’. Today’s conceived spaces
are imbued with big data, HR analytics and AI, and touch many areas
of e-HRM (Stone et  al., 2018): the design of augmented analytics mea-
suring performance and suggesting career advancement embed employees
in a web of data collection devices and spaces of algorithmic surveillance
(Newlands, 2021; Orlikowski & Scott, 2015), and platforms using gam-
ification and wearables to enhance employee’s wellbeing are based on
virtual space design following cognitive-behavioral principles. HRM
8 F. J. PETANI AND J. MENGIS

should recognize that technical features are not just tools for perfor-
mance appraisal, recruitment or employee well-being, but also have
spatial implications shaping the hybrid spaces employees inhabit. It is
thereby not only managers, IT and space designers that design IT-enabled
hybrid spaces (Våland & Georg, 2018; Wasserman & Frenkel, 2011).
Particularly when crises strain, interrupt, or discontinue existing prac-
tices, users are forced to a liminal, innovative designing of pragmatic
adaptations and tactical repurposings of their workspaces (Orlikowski
& Scott, 2021).
Secondly, Lefebvre (1991, p. 38) reminds us to focus on perceived
space. For Lefebvre, perceived space is a concrete property of space,
which today may include the digital materiality (Leonardi, 2010) of
virtual workspaces. He thereby clarifies – similar to what we have seen
within sociomateriality – that perceived space has to be understood as
spatial practice as there is ‘a close association, within perceived space,
between daily reality (daily routine) and urban reality (the routes and
networks which link up the places set aside for work, ‘private’ life and
leisure)’. For HRM, this suggests to understand not only how (IT-enabled)
workspaces are physically built, but also how they are shaped by (and
shape) employees’ everyday work practices. For example, selecting,
recruiting, training, managing performance, or developing careers are
all HRM functions that often contribute to a mix of opposite perceived
effects on the workplace, from depersonalization or dehumanization of
the organizational climate to a people-centred HRM (Palumbo, 2021)
that importantly depend on workers’ spatial practices of technology
(Donnelly & Johns, 2021).
Thirdly, Lefebvre (1991) points to the importance of affectively lived or
representational space. To him, it is the ‘space as directly lived through its
associated images and symbols, and hence the space of “inhabitants” and
“users” […]. This is the dominated – and hence passively experienced –
space, which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate. It overlays
physical space, making symbolic use of its objects’ (1991, p. 39, emphasis
in the original). Lived spaces are not formal, technical representations of
space, or analytical plans, which managers use to enact organizational control
(Townley, 1993). Rather, lived space draws attention on how affect performs
space (Beyes & Steyaert, 2012), with Lefebvre’s (2004) work on rhythms
underscoring that routine work and everyday experience are informed by
and bring about important personal feelings that are spatiotemporally orga-
nized and embodied by users along recurring patterns.
HRM can greatly benefit from a Lefebvrian understanding of space.
What seems particularly relevant for HRM to understand is the link
between practiced and affectively lived spaces, and IT, following, for
instance, the example of Lamprou (2017, p. 1737), who spatially theorizes
 The International Journal of Human Resource Management 9

on ‘the immersed involvement of human agents who dwell in everyday

practice and encounter technological artefacts concernfully’. A Lefebvrian
reading of IT-enabled hybrid spaces allows HRM to consider how affec-
tive atmospheres emerge in IT-enabled hybrid workspaces (De Molli
et  al., 2020), with new possibilities and limitations of controlling employ-
ees’ imaginations of space through aesthetization. Similarly, as the mate-
rialization of designed ‘spatial narratives’ is often haphazard and
inconsistent, HRM may aim to understand how employees ascribe alter-
native meanings to (IT-enabled) spaces and how identities are emplaced
beyond simplified linear processes (Berti et  al., 2018). For instance,
unmanaged liminality at the workplace, or spaces ‘in between’ (e.g.
toilets, backrooms, corridors), have been argued to become ‘transitory
dwelling places’, when employees’ lived experiences at work construct
ambiguous spaces into symbolically meaningful places through their
everyday practices (Shortt, 2015, p. 633). HRM may ask how such
transitory dwelling places and hybrid workspaces are established and
made sense of in IT-enabled practices and virtual spaces. HRM could
usefully develop a similar nuanced understanding of how workers live
the many public, private and hybrid IT-enabled spaces they use (e.g.
chats, messaging groups, corporate intranets, webinars, blogs, podcasts,
social media platforms), to understand the sociomaterial conditions,
whereby IT enables (or hinders) workers’ motivation, affective attach-
ments and commitments. Indeed, the digital features of IT should not
drive attention away from the spatial materialities, or physical sites of
work where IT is practiced, and may start including spatial atmospheres
that are also produced through technology use and the copresence of
others, like in coworking spaces (Endrissat & Leclercq-Vandelannoitte,
2021). In other work situations, telework may happen in either forcefully
isolated or normally remote interactions, for instance between people,
who usually work in presence (i.e. during covid lockdowns, or other
temporary remote work), or instead as the everyday practice of virtual
teams of members working together, without ever having met in person,
or shared the same physical workplace. Clearly, different intra- and
interorganizational interaction dynamics produce different workplaces
and mixed (even coexisting) feelings of autonomy, care and control in
workers (Leclercq-Vandelannoitte, 2021; Sewell & Taskin, 2015). HRM
may still learn a lot about how work is becoming increasingly hybrid
and on how IT practices are rapidly changing rhythms, boundaries, and
emotional qualities of workplaces.
After having appreciated the value of sociomateriality and of Lefebvre’s
space theory for HRM, we now explore how an integration of the two
theoretical bodies can advance our understanding of IT-enabled,
hybrid spaces.
10 F. J. PETANI AND J. MENGIS

3.  An integrated sociomaterial and spatiotemporal approach for

HRM
3.1.  Technology as spatiotemporally situated and technology-as-lived
Despite the important merits of sociomateriality for advancing the under-
standing of IT in HRM, there are also theoretical blindspots that can
benefit from integrating insights from Lefebvre’s spatial theory. In par-
ticular, Lefebvre’s notion of lived space may advance our grasp of tech-
nology as spatiotemporally and historically situated and technology-as-lived.
Table 1 provides an overview on this first integrative potential.
Overall, sociomateriality studies have tended to downplay the affective
dimension of practitioners’ lived experiences, at the risk of perpetuating
dualisms opposing objective/cognitive to subjective/emotional dimensions
(Stein et  al., 2014). In addition, sociomateriality has suffered from insuf-
ficiently defined notions of context, space and time; in particular,
sociomateriality poorly expands on what ‘situated’ means in its view of
‘situated work practices’ over time: the ‘situatedness/situation’ of socioma-
terial practices ignores emotions, although everywhere practices include
‘at all moments the inner life of the actor, his or her mind and heart’
(Ciborra & Willcocks, 2006, p. 139). HRM scholars and practitioners
need an awareness of the spatial, temporal and emotional situatedness
of IT practices to better account for the new hybrid contexts of IT-enabled
work. To this end, Lefebvre’s (1991) spatial triad provides a nuanced
appreciation of the dialectical, historical tension between designed, prac-
ticed and lived spatial dimensions of workplaces that help HRM to grasp
how IT affects hybrid work practices. Lefebvre’s spatial triad should not
be used as a static model that reduces IT to the imposed, material
infrastructure of organizations, designed for social control and paradox-
ically assumed as an indefinite ‘context’ of the production of space

Table 1.  Integration of the strengths of Lefebvre’s spatial triad to overcome limits of socioma-
teriality for HRM.
Strengths of Lefebvre’s Spatial
Triad
1. Recognizes the lived, historical
and affective qualities of
space, stress-sing its ongoing
production, after its physical
completion, in everyday
practices and struggles of
users against technocratic
dominating powers.
2. Focus on political dynamics of
domination and resistance
explains an affectively
stratified becoming (and
enduring) of space over time.
Limits of Sociomateriality
A limited focus on the punctual
and local here-and-now of
practices overlooks lived and
temporally strati-fied affective
trajectories of work. Views
space as physical materiality
or neutrally enduring
sociomaterial assemblage.
Assumes continuous emergence,
providing poor explanation
for the relatively stable
technocratic powers worked
into the design of space and
IT.
Cross Fertilizing Integration
Technology-as-situated &
Technology-as-lived:
Technology is spatially
situated and affectively
lived over time
Processual grasp of the
socio-political and affective
production of IT, historically
conceived, practiced and lived
by users with evolving spatial
affordances.
 The International Journal of Human Resource Management 11

(Lefebvre, 1991), and a sociomaterial relational reading of Lefebvre is

well positioned to prevent a separation of the design of IT-enabled
spaces from the everyday practices and emotional dimensions of users
(Orlikowski & Scott, 2008). We thus foreground the need for HRM to
address holistically the multilayered and historically stratified interactions
between these moments in IT-enabled spaces that impact practioners’
lived experience of hybrid workplaces and the affordances produced
over time.
HRM’s concern that a focus on IT may subtract attention from
employees (Stone et  al., 2015) echoes the fear, frequently expressed in
IS, that a focus on technology-as-designed underestimates
technology-in-use, whereby users evaluate how well IT fits within their
work practices (Faraj & Azad, 2012). The categories of ‘technology-as-de-
signed’ and ‘technology-in-use’ resonate with Lefebvre’s categories of
conceived (i.e. planned, designed) and perceived (i.e. practiced) spaces.
Since Lefebvre (1991) added the notion of lived space to bridge precisely
this dichotomous gap between abstract representations and everyday
spatial practices (Zhang, 2006), we suggest that IS and HRM may profit
from the additional category of ‘technology-as-lived’, by which we mean
the symbolic use of IT that users experience, in their emotional appro-
priation of the evolving affordances (and constraints) of IT practices.
The adoption of new IT, or the emergence of new practices with old
IT, are sociomaterially produced by what workers emotionally experience
and come to care for (Lamprou, 2017; Stein et  al., 2014).
The sociomateriality of IT is not only produced and enacted by how
developers intentionally conceive functions of IT, but also by how designs
live through users’ reconception and appropriation practices (Roth &
Jornet, 2018), or what we call ‘technology-as-lived’, pointing to how
technology is affectively experienced. Accounting for the phenomeno-
logical experience of how the emotional dimensions of IT over time
become embodied in everyday work rhythms (Lefebvre, 2004), promises
great insights for HRM. Engaging with the work experiences and every-
day rhythms (Lefebvre, 2004) of IT practice at an emotional level is
something HRM and IS can learn from studies on how workplaces and
organizational spaces are not just objectively perceived, but also subjec-
tively constructed (Halford & Leonard, 2006; Shortt, 2015).
A practice-based flat ontology overcomes distinctions between indi-
vidual and collective levels of analysis (Schatzki, 2016), but should not
dismiss the temporal becoming of practices. In fact, like space, IT
comes to matter, endures or changes according to particular historical
paths and political struggles of domination and resistance, at the edge
between control and empowerment. IT is not just constantly emerging
in practice, in a spatiotemporally indeterminate situatedness, but IT
12 F. J. PETANI AND J. MENGIS

production (and more or less change-resisting consumption) has affec-

tive histories of stratified past affordances and constraints that
also matter.
One main HRM implication to draw from this first integration, is
that human resources are not separable from their affective, spatiotemporal/
historical and lived situatedness of IT practices. To study, for example,
the historical unprecedented situation whereby lockdowns stirred dif-
ferent workers’ emotional responses in a number of new sociomaterial
configurations, we suggest that in depth, qualitative analyses of how this
digital acceleration played out affectively would provide great HRM
insights on how to co-design with workers a productive post-pandemic
hybrid workplace (Gratton, 2021; Kane et  al., 2021). Also, HRM socioma-
terial research may be addressed under a different perspective. In the
case of the sociomaterial practices of e-HRM, where IT adoption was
perceived to be unsustainably accelerated (Bos-Nehles et  al., 2019), we
would invite an analysis of IT’s affordances and constraints, by adding
qualitative detail on how these workplace changes were lived in practice,
differently from how they were designed to play out. Importantly, hybrid
work is a challenge for HRM because managing the affective entangle-
ment of physical and virtual spaces, both within and outside organiza-
tions, means developing a concern for where, when and how IT practices
enable inspiring corporate workplaces, and other (satellite or alternative)
workspaces.

3.2.  The emerging affordances of workplaces that are always digitally

mediated

In addition to foregrounding how IT practices are spatiotemporally

situated and affectively lived, our integrated framework also contributes
to a reverse insight, namely that contemporary workplaces are con-
tinously producing affordances (and constraints) from a sociomaterial
hybrid configuration that emerges from the practice of digital and phys-
ical spaces. Table 2 illustrates this second integration opportunity and
how the strengths of sociomateriality may compensate for areas under-
theorized by Lefebvre.
The literature on space often underestimates the sociomateriality of
conceived spaces or designed space – with its related perceived and
lived dimensions over time. Designed space and IT appear as abstract,
top-down, technocratic impositions, separated from the sociomaterial
practices of users (paradoxically ignoring even the organizational prac-
tices of designers). We complement this limited view of space and IT,
with insights on how the sociomateriality of (hybrid) workplaces includes
tangible and intangible qualities; a sociomaterial view in fact helps to
 The International Journal of Human Resource Management 13

Table 2.  Integration of the strengths of sociomateriality to overcome the limits of Lefebvre’s
space theory for HRM.
Strengths of Sociomateriality
3. IT does not have inherent
functions but develops
specific affordances and
constraints in practice. A
broad notion of
sociomateriality includes
tangible/physical and
intangible/digital qualities of
IT use.
4. IT is not a fixed, dominating
object, but is always a
technology-in-use involving
an ongoing relational process,
where affordances and
constraints emerge from
complex sociomaterial
interactions.
Limits of Lefebvre’s Spatial Triad
Restricted notion of materiality
(including IT) as physically
tangible or perceived. Tends
to separate social and
material, by predominantly
assigning the former to lived
and conceived space and the
latter to perceived space.
Attributes control over space
and its users to abstract,
ideological designs and
representations of space.
Misses the practiced and
lived materiality of conceived
(IT-enabled) space.
Cross Fertilizing Integration
Workplaces’ affordances
continuously emerging
from social engagements
with digital and physical
materialities
Grasp of the sociomateriality of
intangible qualities of space,
focusing on the affordances
and constraints emerging
over time between physical
and digital spaces.

explain how space and IT may come with inherent, encoded, designed
functions, but that affordances and constraints emerge in complex
human-material hybrid interactions. In particular, the grasping of the
intangible sociomaterialities of space and IT leads us to draw the impli-
cation that HRM needs to understand and manage the unexpected inter-
actions between digital and physical qualities of space and their relational
affordances/constraints over time.
Since work is increasingly inhabitated by digital materialities, work-
places, albeit to different degrees, always include some hybrid form of
digital and physical workspace; put differently, current workspaces
(whether at corporate locations or elsewhere) are never completely IT
free (e.g. workers having smartphones, being video- or digitally surveiled).
All workspaces now have developed a digital/physical hybrid situat-
edness (populated by data flows across many mobile devices, Internet
of things applications and ubiquitous wifi networks and sensors), which
feeds back into the sociomaterial, affective lived experience of workers
with unexpected (not planned) outcomes. Digital materialities of space
here include any smart device, whose screen mediates interactions (in
presence or at a distance). HRM may develop a rich research agenda
on how digital materialities benefit or burden the work of employees
and managers, within, outside and across organizational boundaries (cp.
Donnelly & Johns, 2021).
These sociomaterial configurations greatly matter for how workers
use (or abuse of) IT. Combined with the emotional and spatiotemporal
inseparability of people from their stratified work experiences, the his-
torical shift to an increasingly IT-saturated workplace, suggests that key
14 F. J. PETANI AND J. MENGIS

to workers appropriation of IT is remembering past experiences. Past

workplaces and practices inevitably become positive or negative bench-
marks over time to assess the evolving affordances and constraints of
IT-enabled hybrid workspaces, influencing workers’ adaptation.
We do not provide empirical evidence on how IT use problematically
invades our lives, workspaces and emotions (cp. Wang et al., 2020), but
most readers will have been under the impression of being in physical
presence with partially absent (-minded) coworkers, who divide their
attention (to meetings, lectures or conferences in presence) in hybrid,
simultaneous and often unrelated communications on mobile phones or
laptops. IT use can degenerate into addictions to social media and other
platforms (Young & Case, 2004), and HRM should concern itself about
the emotional stability and mental health of workers, who can get neg-
atively affected by IT-disabling spaces, with undesirable sociomaterial
practices, like uninterrupted hyperconsumption of data.
On the other hand, HRM should not downplay the affordances of
virtual spaces, when the physical absence of coworkers may facilitate
relations and interactions, by subtracting precisely the sociomaterial
cognitive and emotional constraints that humans reproduce in person.
It is well documented that companies adopt algorhythmic decision-making
in HR recruitment and development expressly to overcome human bias
(Köchling & Wehner, 2020). Job candidates and workers may perceive
that it is unfair to be selected by a machine, but HRM still needs
empirically grounded qualitative understandings of how certain workers
may also feel sociomaterially protected by ‘objective’ algorhythms against
subjective social discrimination. Moreover, a distant participation via
written communication enabled by IT platforms (via social media,
intranet or internet-based conversation groups and informal chat systems,
including chatbots) may allow for the emancipation of workers less
extrovert in face-to-face interactions.
No doubt, if Lefebvre had witnessed the big data-powered platformiza-
tion of the economy, he would have criticized these spaces as stereo-
typical capitalist conceived spaces, designed to seamlessly and invisibly
monetize and control our work and private lives. However, along with
accounting for lost affordances, he would not have failed to appreciate
also how digital technology favored emancipation and authentic emo-
tional expression.2

3.3.  An integrative HRM framework for IT-enabled hybrid space

The integration of sociomateriality and Lefebvre’s space theory can be

visualized as an onion-shaped HRM framework of related analytical
layers to research and manage IT-enabled hybrid space (see Figure 1).
 The International Journal of Human Resource Management 15

Figure 1. HRM framework for understanding and managing IT-enabled hybrid space.

When aiming to understand and manage IT-enabled hybrid space,

HRM needs to grasp – at its core – how space is affectively lived (i.e.
remembered and imagined), for which it is important to understand how
the space has been historically stratified (e.g. how collaborative spaces
have been organized in the past and in the present). In addition, HRM
needs to account for how affordances evolve over time (e.g. depending
on changing spatial practices and ways of living space) and how the
physical and digital multiple situatedness of the workspace is enacted in
sociomaterial practices. Our framework thus extends the notion of hybrid
workspace (Halford, 2005), by developing a spatiotemporal and socioma-
terial appreciation that recognizes both the change over time of the affor-
dances of IT and, relatedly, the different emotional responses and lived
affective experiences through which users practice technology across many
workspaces. We built from emerging organizational interests in a socioma-
terial understanding of spatiality as care (Lamprou, 2017), and in the role
of affect in performing space (Beyes & Holt, 2020; Beyes & Steyaert,
2012) to answer HRM’s concern of how IT-enabled hybrid space is lived
(see our research question). Our agential realist view of sociomateriality
(and affordances) posited the social and the material as inseparable, to
provide a relational account of how these (analytically distinguishable
levels, not ontologically distinct entities) interact in practice.
The four layers of Figure 1 are related to the crossfertilizing inte-
grations we discussed above (see Tables 1 and 2) with the core layers
stemming from the strengths of Lefebvre’s spatial theory and the
outer layers stemming from sociomateriality. Our suggestion is that
classic themes of organization studies relevant for HRM (e.g.
16 F. J. PETANI AND J. MENGIS

organizational control, organizationl identity, organizational learning),

have to be revisited in view of the increasing hybridization of the
workspace and can be guided by our framework by paying attention
to the four layers and their interactions. For example, if companies
in the recent past have exerted normative control on employees by
designing workspaces carefully as playful spaces to promote entre-
preneurship and creativity, what new control arrangements are enacted
when work increasingly takes place outside corporate offices, and
how are such forms of control lived? In addition, there are
space-specific challenges of IT-enabled hybrid space, which need to
be addressed with our frameowork, such as how to manage spatial
thresholds and boundaries (De Molli et  al., 2020; Fleming & Spicer,
2004), how to provide liminal, interstitial spaces or transitory dwelling
places (Fayard & Weeks, 2007; Furnari, 2014; Iedema et  al., 2010;
Shortt, 2015), or how to deal with issues of addiction to or resistance
against IT-enabled hybrid spaces and control practices (Bain & Taylor,
2000; Courpasson et  al., 2017; Dale, 2005; Leclercq-Vandelannoitte,
2013, 2021; Sewell & Taskin, 2015; Shortt et al., 2014; Symon &
Pritchard, 2015; Young & Case, 2004). The dimensions of our HRM
framework suggest a possible, comprehensive understanding of
IT-enabled hybrid spaces that applies well beyond the particular case
of telework. Across the non-exhaustive research areas of telework,
coworking spaces, nomad work, virtual teams, gig work, hacking, and
studies of spatial mobility work dynamics, our framework suggests
broad research questions such as:

• How are virtual workspaces entangled with physical ones and how
is this entanglement affectively lived and historically stratified as
affordance or as constraint?
• How does IT affect practitioners in their everyday work practices?
How can emotions explain the lived digital reconfigurations that
co-design hybrid workplaces over time?
• How do workers affectively live IT-enabled changes in the spatial
arrangement of work? What is the role of remembering work-
spaces of the past, in the affective living of hybrid digital and
physical spaces?
• How can HRM support a balanced affective involvement of work-
ers in IT-enabled hybrid spaces of evolving affordances, by moni-
toring their emotions and work rhythms (wherever they take place,
including online) without breaching their privacy with intrusive
surveillance?
 The International Journal of Human Resource Management 17

Hybrid work spaces provide unique challenges for HRM to understand

how spaces are affectively lived in increasingly digital workplaces, with
employees inhabiting multiple spaces at once, leading to complex inter-
stices between the spaces’ diverse materialities asking for different pres-
ences, attentions and (affective) commitments. One may just think about
how ubiquitous computing has changed cars into very interesting spaces,
to start appreciating how the ‘multicontextuality’ of work (Henfridsson
& Lindgren, 2005) is made of very different emotions that HRM needs
to account for.
Answers to the question on how IT-enabled hybrid spaces are lived
surely do not promise standardized practices and universally valid, turn-
key solutions, but may suggest ways for HRM to theorize on particular
workers’ typologies along the four dimensions of Figure 1, and HRM
may develop strategies to manage IT-enabled hybrid spaces in different
cases and over time. The claim that a virtual HR can strategically elim-
inate space and time barriers, enabling firms to do ‘anything, anytime,
anywhere’ (Lepak & Snell, 1998), and decontextualizing HRM is a rhe-
torical illusion (Donnelly & Johns, 2021). Despite widespread claims of
nomadic work, independent of all spatiotemporal constraints, perhaps
running the risk of stating the obvious, we conclude that, however smart
and virtual, nowhere and never will work be carried out in a spatiotem-
poral, emotional and sociomaterial void. HRM can remind managers and
scholars that anywhere-and-anytime collaborations may well mean ‘dis-
located and asynchronous’ digital interactions, including all-remote firms
(Choudhury, 2020), but not aspatial, atemporal or emotionless
(non-existing) work practices. IT is ubiquitous and hybridizing our new
and traditional workplaces. Where, when and how work is carried out,
through what sociomaterial IT practices and emotions, makes a great
difference today and will continue to make a difference tomorrow.

4.  Concluding remarks

The increasing use of distant digital interactions constrains HRM’s role
of motivating employees, fostering their sense of belonging and identi-
fication with corporate values. Benefits provided by physical workplaces
may get eroded when workers no longer cohabit physically in shared
physical workplaces at least part of their work time. HRM should not
neglect the affective experiences of IT-enabled spaces, lived by employees
and collaborators working elsewhere than in corporate spaces. Covid-19
accelerated the spatial distribution of hybrid work, raising awareness
about the challenges that HRM may choose to address also through our
sociomaterial and Lefebrian integrated approach.
18 F. J. PETANI AND J. MENGIS

Technology influences how we conceive, perceive and live our work-

places and private lives. Our emotions come from past interactions that
are still affectively present to us, influencing our perception and moti-
vation towards future action possibilities (Faraj & Azad, 2012). Such an
affective process of development increasingly depends on our IT-enabled
historical interactions, on where and when we worked, including in
which real and virtual networks we emotionally engaged, at what age
and level of career seniority, which again relate to how affordances
evolve in relation to historical stratification of lived work experiences
(Figure 1). An HRM agenda on how IT-enabled hybrid spaces constitute
meaningful workplaces should include research on virtual spaces
(Harrison & Dourish, 1996; Saunders et  al., 2011) and their affective
affordances as a way to shed light on technology-as-lived. The socioma-
teriality literature is not the only IS approach that may inform this
agenda, and Lefebvre’s (1991) spatial theory is one amongst many
exploited in organizational space literature; moreover, we offered one of
many possible integrations of these two approaches. In recognizing these
limitations, we hope to have started a useful conversation for HRM to
appreciate the affective and spatiotemporal dimension of digital and
physical workplaces, and to sensitize scholars on how these may be
conceptualized in hybrid work (well beyond telework). Workers, includ-
ing HR managers, navigate IT-enabled hybrid spaces of autonomy and
control, flexible and rigid rules. They see strategic plans through, and
adjust them to the digital rhythms of a society with rapidly evolving
employment relations and work practices. Their feelings matter.

Notes
1. The approaches differ ontologically, claiming there is no social interaction distinct
from materiality (Agential realism), or posing the social context as separate from
the materiality in it (Critical realism) (see Leonardi, 2013, p. 74). For an approach
that sidesteps these theoretical distinctions to use affordance as a theoretical
apparatus to explore the sociomaterial role of IT in organizational practices, see
Fayard and Weeks (2014).
2. Lefebvre did address the social tensions of IT. A self-described ‘optimist’ discourse
on technology  observed ‘Note the growing integration of family life and groups
into the life of society and the world… Isn’t what you call daily life going to be
absorbed into the intense sociability contained in, and diffused by, communica-
tion and information?’, in opposition to a ‘nostalgic’, more critical discourse: ‘For
the better? That is far from being proved: at the very least, the disadvantages
match the advantages […] careful: rather than uniting people, can’t the media,
communications and information technology divide them? Doesn’t it depend on
the social and political use made of new techniques? The integration of the
private into the social? Do you believe that social life has greatly benefited, been
much enriched, since the development of communications?’ (Lefebvre, 2014, pp.
 The International Journal of Human Resource Management 19

683–684).A passage of Rhythmanalysis, takes however a clear critical stance against

IT and everyday life: ‘Technologies kill immediacy […] The impact of techno-
logical conquests does not make the everyday any more alive; it nourishes ide-
ology’ (Lefebvre, 2004, p. 53, emphasis in the original).

Acknowledgments
The first author would like to thank Cegid SA and Esker SA for their support of the
Research Chair in Digital Innovation, Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at INSEEC
Lyon. Both authors thank the reviewers and the handling editor Prof. Tanya Bondarouk
for their constructive support during the revision process.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

Data sharing not applicable – no new data generated.
Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analyzed
in this study.

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