Toward a Theory of Identity Performance in Unsettled Digital Work: The Becoming of ‘Digital Nomads’

Abstract

The advent of ‘digital’ ways of working and organising is unequivocally transforming the very fabric of work, leading to an increasingly uncertain, unsettled, and fluid environment. Research has traditionally anchored worker identity in fixed and place-bound concepts. However, in the digital workplace, where work is more akin to a performance, unfolding over time, and processual in nature, our understanding of work and theories of worker identity are called into question. In this paper, we ask the question: how is digital worker identity performed in such fluid and unsettled work settings? To explain digital worker identity performance, we investigate digital nomadism as an extremely fluid and unsettled case of digital work. We study digital nomads, high-skilled professionals who use digital technologies to work remotely and lead a nomadic lifestyle, in a multi-sited ethnographic field study. Based on a process-relational perspective, we are theorising how the identity of digital nomads, their “becoming,” is performed as an ongoing process along lines of identity performance. This is an intermediate “product of theorising,” in accord with the aim of the special issue, but provides a foundation for a novel process-relational theory of identity performance in unsettled digital work.