Chapter 11

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Understanding Mobile Negotiation: Contributions & Theory

There are four contributions of this book that are illustrated in this chapter. Being able to provide a two-and-a-half-decade longitudinal perspective on how mobile devices have diffused into organizations allows me to develop a big-picture understanding of communication practices. I show how the society-level phenomenon of IT consumerization, combined with norms of connectedness, can be overlaid with the struggles for control that organizations and individuals experienced. My data also illustrate the nuances of the affordance of availability and show that people must learn to negotiate their unavailability, as well as their reachability. Perceived acceptability of mobile communication at work is harder to negotiate but still possible, depending on the level of job prestige and job-role requirements. Finally, there’s a dialectic of control because organizations and their members have both dependence on and control over one another. It’s a see-saw, a tug-of-war, and a negotiation for mobile communication control.

Changing communities by capitalizing on research in communication technologies.