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Situated within the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada, the Chapman Learning Commons (CLC) has been offering academic transition and learning support programs targeted to first year students since 2002. A recent addition to our suite of services is the Profs-in-Commons program which invites faculty members to conduct their office hours and host events in the CLC. The program has been an important initiative for the Learning Commons and the UBC campus community because it encourages student–faculty interaction outside of the classroom; it increases student’s attendance in course-based office hours – hosted by faculty members and it leverages the status of libraries as neutral, collaborative, and community-oriented learning spaces. The program is grounded in student engagement research consistently showing that students’ transition to university is greatly enhanced when they foster academic connections with faculty members. Profs-in-Commons also responds to research into best practices for how to support student transition to university academic environments. This chapter will elaborate on the theoretical foundations of the Profs-in-Commons program, share how the UBC-Vancouver Profs-in-Commons program was initiated and is sustained, and discuss the program’s benefits and challenges.

This chapter focuses on the physical work environment, in particular, the possibilities and limitations of biophilic design in hotel office space. Biophilic design has already gained attention in directly influencing the guest experience, but little focus has been given to workspace. Traditionally, the hospitality industry places employees' office spaces in parts of the hotel not appropriate as guest space due to lack of daylight and windows. Many studies have shown that improving the workplace with nature-based features can play a role in increasing employee well-being. Data collected from employees with both extensive managerial and back-of-house hotel experience established that employees would welcome the opportunity to work in such an environment and currently find back-of-house design basic and lacking any aesthetically pleasing elements. An understanding of the obstacles in initiating such changes was shown as well as employee initiatives to improve work spaces. This initial exploratory study concludes that the needs of employees in terms of comfort, wellbeing, motivation and work satisfaction are often overlooked when considering back-of-house spaces. There is a general understanding and expectation that management needs to develop awareness and practical initiatives to address the deficits of the physical work environment. Biophilic design can be influential in promoting a calming and restorative environment at the workplace and thus positively impacting employee motivation and performance.

In this paper, I explore the role of the imagination in the construction of meaningful places out of the transnational corporate spaces of the late-20th century global economy. As others have made clear, there is a politics to the social imagination that achieves its most onerous effect in the ethnic/racial/gendered/national stratification of the global workforce.¹ In this regard, I wish to consider how the colonial imagination operates within an urban terrain occupied by a diverse population united (however tangentially) through the exigencies of the global economy. I take the colonial imagination as a key component of a broader transnational socio-spatial imagination through which Indonesian and Western-born members of the transnational capitalist class make sense of a complicated social geography to which neither is, strictly speaking, indigenous.

In this paper, I explore what shapes the identities of digital nomads (DNs), a class of remote workers who travel and work concurrently. Through extensive fieldwork and interviews with 50 digital nomads conducted in seven coworking hostels in Mexico in 2022, I construct a theory of DN identity. I base this upon the frequent transformations they undergo in their Circumstances, which regularly change their worker identity.

DNs relinquish traditional social determinants of identity, such as nationality and religion. They define their personal identities by their passions and interests, which are influenced by the people they meet. DNs exist in inherently transitive social spaces and, without rigid social roles to fulfil, they represent themselves authentically. They form close relationships with other long-term travellers to combat loneliness and homesickness. Digital nomads define their worker identities around their location independence. This study shows that DNs value their nomadic lifestyle above promotions and financial gain. They define themselves by productivity and professionalism to ensure the sustainability of their lifestyle. Furthermore, digital nomad coworking hubs serve focused, individual work, leaving workplace politics and strict ‘office image’ norms behind. Without fixed social and professional roles to play, digital nomads define themselves personally according to their ever-evolving passions and the sustainability of their nomadic life. Based on these findings, I present a cyclical framework for DN identity evolution which demonstrates how relational, logistical, and socio-personal flux evolves DN’s worker identities.

In this chapter, the authors study work from home (WFH) and work from office (WFO) formats using institutional logic. Four start-ups in India have been studied using qualitative interview data reflecting their transition to WFH during the COVID-19 crisis and subsequent nationwide lockdown. Institutional logics is the framework drawn upon to enhance our understanding of the phenomenon. While conceptualising institutional logics in the context of WFH and WFO, the authors discuss the implications of WFH for both entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship. Finally, it is proposed that hybrid workspaces may be the way for the future.