Our teams focus a fair bit on mobile communication research. Let me explain what this means. Mobile communication research is a combination of the notion that mobility influences communication patterns as well as how people use mobile devices to communicate. People often think of this in terms of mobile phones or cell phones, but it can include any communication tools and practices where communicators are mobile.
One example is the work of Keri Stephens in her book Negotiating Control: Organizations and Mobile Communication. Here she provides a historical perspective on how mobile devices entered work and how employers and employees are struggling to understand the emerging norms of these practices.
Keri Stephens and Jessica Ford partnered on several studies focused on how janitors used mobile devices at work. Janitors are manual labor workers, so they don’t manual workersit behind a desk and use traditional computing tools. In this research we find that policies, known as bring-your-own-device-to-work policies are interpreted differently by the janitors in our study. They were afraid to break the rules and often left their cell phones in their cars of lockers to avoid being caught with them on the job.
Our research team that examined mobile device use in hospitals won the top paper award for the International Communication Association’s Mobile Communication Division. We later revised this paper and submitted it for publication in the proceedings of the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. We studied how a hospital implemented a bring your own device to work policy and the resulting complications. For example, some nurses didn’t want to combine their personal and professional use of mobile phones, while others welcomed carrying a single device and centralizing their communication.
