Unleashing Mobility in the Organization: A Time-Geography Perspective

The increased fluidity and agility of organizations demand the smooth mediation of information technology (IT) between user and task. As rigid hierarchies are giving way to open, loosely-coupled, mobile ways for collaborative business, mobility enabled by IT tools has been proposed as potential capability that can provide new dimensions in such mediation. But, few studies have provided an integrative theoretical framework on mobility. In addition, most studies have focused on either spatial or temporal dimensions of mobility, while ignoring the contextual dimension. In this paper, we propose a framework that is designed to capture the emergent impact of the use of mobile tools in the organization. It draws upon a time-geography perspective in building an integrated framework of three aspects of mobility constraints: capability, coupling, and regulatory. The usefulness of the framework is illustrated using a case study on the implementation of mobile devices in the Center City District (CCD) of Philadelphia. The paper concludes with contributions and recommendations for future research.