Virtual Mobility and the Lonely Cloud: Theorizing the Mobility-Isolation Paradox for Self-Employed Knowledge-Workers in the Online Home-Based Business Context

Abstract

We advance both mobility and paradox theorizing by advocating the new concepts of ‘mobility-isolation paradox’ and ‘paradoxical imagination’. These emerged from examining the nuanced, multifaceted conceptualizations of the mobility-isolation tensions facing home-based, self-employed, online knowledge-workers. We thereby enhance current conceptual understandings of mobility, isolation and paradox by analyzing knowledge-workers’ interrelated, multidimensional experiences within restrictive home-based working contexts. We compare the dearth of research and theorizing about these autonomous online knowledge-workers with that available about other types of knowledge-workers, such as online home-based employees, and the more physically/corporeally mobile self-employed. This research into an increasingly prevalent knowledge-worker genre addresses these knowledge gaps by analyzing home-based knowledge-workers’ views, and tensions from paradoxical pressures to be corporeally mobile and less isolated. Despite enjoying career, mental and virtual mobility through internet-connectedness, they were found to seek face-to-face social and/or professional interactions, their isolation engendering loneliness, despite their solitude paradoxically often fostering creativity and innovation.