Chapter 5

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Trust, Understanding, and Mobile Control in Manual Work

As mobile devices became more affordable, people at all job levels, and in many different roles, started bringing their personal devices to work.  All of a sudden, people saw workers—whose jobs involved manual labor—pull out their mobiles and tap away.  There was an assumption that they were often cyberslacking—wasting work time on non-work tasks.  In this chapter, you’ll meet a group of janitors who are banned from using their personal devices at work.  But their supervisors are really stuck in an awkward place: they’re sandwiched between needing to communicate face-to-face with their subordinates, while being expected to be constantly reachable through multiple ICTs, because that’s how their own managers communicate.   The ban reinforced existing power structures; there were issues of trust, language barriers, computer literacy, and the inconsistent enforcement of rules.  The irony is that this ban actually harmed productivity, and my findings suggest that these manual workers can use mobile devices productively: they still need access to on-the-job information.

Changing communities by capitalizing on research in communication technologies.