‘Business Code/Spaces’ in digital service firms: The case of online multinational fashion retailing

Abstract

The impacts of digital technology on the spaces and practices of firms are of increasing concern, yet we know comparatively little about how emerging digital business models affect the ‘business spaces’ of service firms. We draw on case study research within five leading online fashion retailers to identify interweaving virtual and physical spaces of online retailing that are expressed through intra- and inter-firm digital interdependency management. This allows us to build a conceptualisation of the ‘business code/spaces’ of digital service firms, i.e., the entanglements between virtual, information-rich and responsive networked infrastructures, and materially and socially situated infrastructures. The conceptualisation of ‘business code/spaces’ reveals how combinations of embedded interpersonal decision-making within office-based work communities, networked partners, their established processes and bureaucracies, as well as the physical restrictions of space and place together reproduce spatial fixes and local–global geographies, but in ways fundamentally defined by digital technologies and business models. Our conceptualisation of ‘business code/spaces’, therefore, contributes to research examining the inter-relationships between ‘the digital’ and business practices as well as work concerning global retailing.