CSCW for the Mobile Teleworker

Abstract

Telework, broadly defined, means ‘working at a distance’: the person doing the work is at a distance from colleagues with whom he or she works, or from ‘customers’ — those who use the work outputs. The most popular example is the person who works at home instead of commuting to a distant office. Another is the ‘mobile worker’ — one whose ‘place of work’ isn’t fixed at all, and who needs to be effective in a range of different work settings. There are some workers for whom mobility is central to their role — for example, field service engineers (Davies et al., this volume), delivery workers, some salespeople (Ainger and Maher, this volume). In this chapter we use the term ‘field based’ to describe such roles. There are other roles whose mobility is intrinsic but none the less vital, for example consultants, managers, many professionals, other kinds of salespeople. These we call ‘intrinsically mobile’ workers.