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Mothers, especially working mothers, take an active role in many activities. They manage the family’s daily lives. They take care of children. They work or study. And they also strive to take care of themselves. Working mothers are normally overloaded with all kinds of tasks ‐ almost on a daily basis, year after year. Although there are many many kinds of useful information and services available over the Internet that could be a big help to mothers, working mothers or mothers with children around them at home are often so occupied that they cannot afford the luxury of sitting in front of a computer to access those services. So, what kind of services could help to make their lives a bit easier? Readily accessible mobile services over the wireless network seem to be exactly what they need. But what mobile e‐services do working mothers need? What is the specific added value offered by such services? These form the issues that we will address in this paper.

When working remotely, homeworkers are provided with various technologies which may help them to avoid experiencing feelings of social isolation from colleagues. These include the mobile phone, which provides homeworkers with the means of engaging in interaction with colleagues irrespective of time and location. This paper aims to investigate how the mobile phone is used by homeworkers for social interaction purposes.

Data are collected from 25 respondents working in a telecommunications organisation using in‐depth, semi‐structured interviews.

Upon analysis, it emerges that a significant number of respondents use their mobile phone for retaining social interaction with colleagues outside of their designated work time and space. It also emerges that certain organisational factors help to explain why interaction is maintained in this way.

Implications for organisations employing homeworking are also presented, together with how the limitations of the paper can be overcome in future research.

The results challenge the common assertions concerning social isolation made within homeworking literature; these are discussed within the paper, which also addresses how the findings of this paper aim to aid, as well as to direct, theoretical progression within this area.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of co-working trends, drivers, and explore how the use of such workspaces may support employers wishing to increase the sense of belonging and acceptance of their mobile workers at work.

This conceptual paper reviews recent literature on co-working, relating this trend to changes in the nature of work, property management and the use of workplaces by employees. A particular focus concerns the social aspects of co-working which may be critical for supporting mobile workers’ sense of inclusion in a work community.

Co-working spaces provide important sources of support, learning and networking opportunities (and hence inclusion), which may offset the lack of community and opportunities that mobile workers face when working outside the main offices of their employers. The authors outline the practical implications as well as recommendations for employers interested in selecting or organising their own co-working spaces. Several research gaps are also delineated for researchers interested in this area.

The use of independent and consultancy-type co-working spaces offer new working opportunities for mobile workers employed in private, public and community organisations. The creation of corporate co-working spaces also provides new learning opportunities for employers that want to create and promote flexible as well as inclusive working environments for their mobile workers.

The research on co-working is relatively limited to date. The current paper provides an important overview of drivers and several starting point for employers interested in learning more about co-working.

This research aims to aggregate and categorise distinct places for multi-locational work from the 1960s until today. Based on an understanding of the user needs connected to these locations, the paper aims to identify the service concepts and workplace design solutions by which these needs can be met.

The literature review is based on academic journal papers, reports and books related to the topic.

The paper categorises the main multi-locational workplace locations, namely, organisational offices, home offices, mobile workplaces and flexible offices. The user needs in these locations vary from concept to concept, and therefore, the service offers are distinct. Based on the results, the service provision of organisational offices and flexible offices should focus on providing users with the chance for socialisation using collaborative space solutions and community management policies. In the cases of home offices and mobile workplaces, service provision should instead emphasise ensuring functionalities such as efficient virtual connectivity and accessibility. Additionally, more concept-specific user needs are identified.

The paper offers an overview of and framework for future research and concept development. The limitations of cultural differences could have been investigated more.

The results provide insight into the purposes of facilities management and workplace design when developing service concepts for multi-locational workplaces.

The paper establishes a literature-based framework for the service concepts of places for multi-locational work.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how a technical consulting firm approaches the development of engineering consultants, to prepare them to deal with their liminal, i.e. mobile and transient work situation. More specifically, this paper addresses how a training program, designed for newly graduated engineers, can increase the consultants’ liminality competence.

This paper reports on a qualitative case study of an introductory development program in a Scandinavian technical consulting firm. The study is based on observations of training sessions and meetings, and interviews with developers, leaders and participants of the program.

This study identifies three processes, which develop the engineering consultants’ ability to master their mobile and transient work situation: identifying the core of an assignment, embracing “in-betweenness” and broadening the scope of action.

This paper enhances the understanding of formal training in the context of technical consulting and adds to the knowledge of how engineering consultants can master their liminal work positions; in particular, the study identifies how liminality competence can be elevated through formal training.

The purpose of this paper is to critically analyze the discourses on migrant acculturation and migrants’ mobile phone communication, in order to examine the inclusiveness of communication-acculturation research in the recent years.

The paper draws on from 102 qualitative interviews (48 Malayali, 26 Bangla, 17 Tamil and 11 Telugu) for a larger research project that investigated the role of mobile phones in migrant acculturation in Singapore. Respondents were selected using a combination of purposive and snowball sampling methods. The respondents had been in Singapore for varying amount of time: from one month to 19 years.

The analysis of the discourses on migrant acculturation and mobile phone communication revealed that labor migrants were excluded on the basis of their temporary status and apprehensions on work productivity. The mobile usage prohibitions that existed in work sites were hinged on similar discourses that stereotyped the labor migrants. The emancipatory metaphor that has been at the center of research on migrants’ mobile phone usage and acculturation needs to be replaced with a critical discourse perspective.

The data were originally collected for a research project that approached the phenomena of acculturation and mobile phone appropriation from a positivist perspective, whereas this paper analyzed the data to critically examine the discourses that supported the premise of the project itself. Due to this, the findings presented in this paper have limited scope for generalization.

The paper critiques the research trends in migrant acculturation and mobile phone communication and suggests a possible alternative that goes beyond the “transcendental teleology” that underpins discourse and practice.

A lot of recent research has been focused on developing network mobility management to support the movement of a mobile network consisting of several mobile nodes. The IETF NEMO working group proposed the NEMO basic support protocol that defines a methodology for supporting such network mobility using bi‐directional tunneling between the home agent and the mobile router. However, this protocol has been found to suffer from the so‐called ‘dog‐leg problem’, and despite alternative research efforts to solve this problem, there are still limitations in the efficiency of real time data transmission and intra‐domain communication. Accordingly, the current paper proposes a new route optimization methodology that uses unidirectional tunneling and a tree‐based intra‐domain routing mechanism. As such, the proposed scheme can provide faster signaling and data transmission and be easily extended to support micro‐mobility without any additional extensions. The performance of the proposed scheme is also evaluated to demonstrate its efficiency.

In this chapter, we present the Mobile Technology Capacity Building (MTCB) Framework, designed to enhance students’ appropriate use of personal mobile devices (PMDs) in workplace learning (WPL). WPL is a concept that denotes students’ learning that occurs in workplaces as part of their university curriculum. The workplace provides an environment for university students where learning and working and theory and practice are entwined. As such, WPL is an in-between or hybrid space where traditional roles, identities, and cultures are fluid and in transition. In the 21st century, where PMDs are more and more intricately interwoven into everyday personal, educational, and professional practices, learning with mobile technology offers new opportunities and possibilities to enhance WPL. The MTCB Framework for WPL focuses on cultivating agency and thoughtful consideration for practice contexts. Its development is underpinned by three sets of theoretical ideas: agentic learning, activity-centered learning design, and the entanglement of technology, learning, and work. Its design also draws on empirical data derived from surveys and interviews from 214 participants, including students, academics, and workplace educators that highlight the importance of considering workplace cultures. We conclude that the MTCB Framework addresses an urgent need for all stakeholders in WPL to build their capacity to use mobile technology effectively to contribute to enhancing WPL. Without a shared understanding of the role of mobile technology in WPL, it will remain difficult for students to make the most of the learning opportunities afforded by the use of PMDs in WPL.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the currently experienced benefits and obstacles for enhancing facilties management (FM) with the currently available technological enablers.

This paper presents an integration of several studies conducted to identify the current benefits and obstacles of mobile technology as perceived by the Finnish FM professionals. The main intentions of the study were: to describe the current technological enablers for the utilisation of mobile technology at FM settings; and to interview the FM professionals on their perceived benefits and obstacles of the utilisation of the currently available technology.

The change of practice to support the exploitation of mobile technology is emergent. The findings of the empirical part include the currently feasible mobile solutions and their perceived limitations. The experiences benefits are discussed and critical success factors are nominated. The perceived benefits are mostly related to improved resource efficiency and quality control. The essential success factors and remaining obstacles are discussed.

The empirical part is limited to Finnish settings, but the observations are likely valid in several other developed countries as well.

The change of FM practice to benefit from the exploitation of mobile technology is emergent.

The paper gives experience‐based suggestions for both demand and supply sides of the service procurement to gain the feasible benefits and avoid the currently hindering obstacles, as the paper provides insight of the current and future tools for the mobile aspects of FM. The findings are relevant for the service providers and operators as well.

A mobile office can be defined as software and hardware that support business work and that are accessible via smartphones. Organizations are adopting or trying to adopt the mobile office as their communication and business tool, in order to support or to change their current work environments. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the impact of outsourcing strategy on mobile office performance based on the FORT model and the MoBiS-Q to measure the performance of the outsourced mobile office.

This study focuses on the impact of outsourcing strategy on mobile office performance based on the FORT model and the MoBiS-Q to measure the performance of the outsourced mobile office.

In the results, the perceived usability and the perceived impact of the mobile office on the productivity can be higher with the Alliance outsourcing relationship type. The outsourcing of the mobile office would follow the similar process of other IT outsourcing strategies. But the device fittingness was far from the expectation.

Firms/organizations should consider a more concrete step-by-step approach to strategic outsourcing relationships with the high-skilled expert groups and that the device fittingness may not be a proper factor to measure the performance of the outsourced mobile office.

IT managers who plan or now try to adopt the mobile office into their organizations should focus on developing proper applications and software; however, they do not need to care about device or H/W issues, including employees ' skills at using the devices or the device fittingness for the planned mobile office.

This study is one of the first academic studies to analyze the impact of outsourcing strategy of the mobile office on organization performance.