The ongoing digitalization of our lives has revolutionized the working world. Concepts such as digital labor and playbour, the gig economy, the platform economy, the sharing economy, crowdsourcing, algorithmic automation, cloud-working, liquid work-force, esports, people analytics, the blockchain, human automation resource management, and Industry 4.0 have developed new digital professions and working conditions. They even led to an intensification of the work-life-blending. At the same time, the recent changes to our traditional working environments (i.e., COVID lockdown) have accelerated the need to extend and develop our digital approaches to working environments and practices (e.g., remote work) and our work-life balance. We are experiencing a paradigm shift in our workforce and working environments, which poses great opportunities and threats for the existing work forms and future forms of digitized work. This paradigm shift requires more significant, innovative, and multidisciplinary research that can address the current issues we are experiencing during the transition phase to a (hopefully) Post-COVID world and ways in which modern digital professions can guide the transition of our traditional work environments. It becomes evident that the working world has changed immensely in the last years and will change in the coming years fundamentally: “Analog” work forms will become more obsolete, and hybrid work forms will become the “new norm.”

In this minitrack, we are looking for theoretical, conceptual and empirical papers investigating the paradigm shifts of digital work. We anticipate submissions including (but not limited to) the following topics:

Employee Relations

• Motivating the future digital workforce
• Work-life-balance, work-life separation, and work-life-blending
• Dealing with mental health issues in digitized work
• Dealing with social isolation in digitized work
• Dealing with the digital divide from a temporal and spatial perspective
• Temporary groups (pick-up groups) transforming into long-term teams
• Intercultural communication and intercultural challenges

Human Resource Management

• Distant leadership and management of the digitalized workforce
• The implications of AI and algorithmic leadership
• Leadership for cloud-worker, click-worker, crowd-worker, and digital nomads
• Gamification of performance measurements in digital work
• Balancing self-leadership and intrinsic motivation with self-exploitation
• Empowerment and motivation of the employees digitally
• Skill development, learning, and talent identification in the digital environment
• The design of virtual recruiting (e.g., gamified assessment center, virtual onboarding)
• Establishing human automation resource management in the organization

Digital Work

• Digital professions and practices
• Balancing trust and surveillance in digital work and remote work
• Augmentation of the work interface
• Utilization of big data to empowering the digital employees
• Platformization of digital work
• Digitalized professions and work forms

Virtual and Borderless Organization

• Foster (open) innovation and intrapreneurship
• Fostering an organizational culture, work climate, commitment, and retention in a virtual organization
• Dissolution of company borders into the borderless organization
• Employee participation, collaboration, workers councils, and unions in a global digital world
• Avoiding the digital Taylorism and tackling the power shift in the new work forms
• Establishing employee-focused strategies and creating a sustainable busi-ness model
• Professionalization of a hybrid workplace
• Juridical and regulatory issues concerning remote and digitalized work
• The role of the HR department in this digital world

Accepted papers will be considered for a publication in the German Human Resource Management Journal. For further Information please contact the chair of the minitrack.

Minitrack Co-Chairs:

Tobias Scholz (Primary Contact)
University of Siegen
tobias.scholz@uni-siegen.de

Juho Hamari
Tampere University
juho.hamari@tuni.fi

Maria Törhönen
Tampere University
maria.torhonen@tut.fi

Brian McCauley
Jönköping University
brian.mccauley@ju.se