Simultaneously Here and There: Situating online organizing in our embodied material practices

Abstract

Online organizing is situated in offline practices. Recent theorizing has examined how online and offline practices co-evolve over time, but given limited attention to how they co-exist in time. Yet, without being ‘here’ in an embodied material practice, we cannot experience being ‘there’ online. Understanding the co-existence of online and offline practices is important as organizing becomes actively negotiated in the moments of being simultaneously here offline and there online. In this article, we pull the field of view back from the computer screen to theorize the simultaneity of online organizing with multiple offline practices in which participants are embodied and engage materially. We articulate how, in the case of the video conference, the shared experience of presence, proximity and participation in online organizing is constituted in relation to multiple – but mostly unshared – offline practices. We argue that this interconnection with multiple offline practices can blur boundaries, divert purposes and lead to glitches and breakdowns in online organizing. We make two contributions. First, we recast online organizing as embedded in multiple, mostly unshared, offline practices. Second, we develop understanding of the co-existence of online and offline in time, and its implications for interacting and organizing online. We conclude by suggesting new directions for research on organizing across simultaneously co-existing online and offline practices.

Introduction

Recent theorizing of the interrelations of online and offline practices has examined how practices co-evolve over time, but given limited attention to how they co-exist in time. Organization scholars have advanced our understanding of social interactions online (e.g. Hinds & Bailey, 2003; Jarvenpaa & Leidner, 1999; Nardi, 2010; Pearlson & Saunders, 2001; Raghuram et al., 2019) and of situated practices offline (e.g. Nicolini, 2012; Shove et al., 2012). Further research has explored the offline impacts of online organizing (Elmholdt et al., 2021; Karunakaran et al., 2021; Lanzara, 2016; Nicolini, 2007; Rauch & Ansari, 2022). For instance, studies have traced how social media commentary provokes a response in the offline practices (Karunakaran et al., 2021), or remote work disrupts meanings and moral values (Rauch & Ansari, 2022). Although these studies have unpacked the organizational consequences of online work as it unfolds over time, they have not been concerned with the co-existence of online and offline in time, and its implications for interacting and organizing.

Yet, online practices always co-exist with offline practices. Without being ‘here’ in an embodied material practice, we cannot experience being ‘there’ online. Understanding the co-existence of online and offline practices in time is important as organizing becomes actively negotiated in the moments of being simultaneously here (offline) and there (online). In the case of the video conference, pulling the field of view back from the computer screen brings into view not just the organizing taking place in an online meeting, but also a multiplicity of offline practices by which participants connect and engage with others. These offline practices, however, remain mostly unseen in the online meeting. For example, online participants might interact with on-site colleagues to gather additional materials for the online meeting, or engage in completely unrelated practices such as preparing their children for school. Thus, understanding the co-existence of online and offline practice ‘in time’ is to uncover how they interrelate in the moments in which organizing is negotiated.

Building on practice theories (see also Ewenstein & Whyte, 2007; Nicolini, 2007; Shove et al., 2012), we articulate how, in this case of the video conference, the sense of being ‘there’ in an online practice is grounded in embodied and material practices offline. Practices are defined in the literature as ‘routinized way[s] in which bodies are moved, objects are handled, subjects are treated, things are described and the world is understood’ (Reckwitz, 2002, p. 250). Through the video-conference meeting, participants simultaneously interact and engage with represented others online – coming together, meeting and organizing – while also being situated in, and acting within, their practices offline. Even where the online practice is the locus of social interaction and organizing, and has the participants’ attention, we still observe how it co-exists with the multiplicity of interconnected offline, embodied, material practices. For example, to write this article we participated in regular online meetings and collaborated via video conference. As these meetings involved actions in the present that spanned continents, we negotiated organizing across multiple offline practices that combined mornings, afternoons and evenings, and engaged physical spaces that were variously coinhabited by other practices (both related and unrelated).

We extend the emerging strand of research on the interrelations between online and offline (Karunakaran et al., 2021; Rauch & Ansari, 2022) by theorizing the empirical phenomenon of being simultaneously ‘here’ in a lived reality offline and ‘there’ in a meeting online. We make two contributions. First, we recast online organizing as embedded in multiple, mostly unshared, offline practices. Second, we develop understanding of the implications of the co-existence of online and offline in time for interacting and organizing online. In the next section, we provide a theoretical background to our argument, drawing on practice theories to set out the key concepts of embodiment and materiality, and of multiple interconnected practices. In the following section, we then integrate insights from different strands of literature on online interaction (e.g. virtual work, communication theory, digital practices) to theorize how, in interacting online through the video-conference meeting, the participants’ experience of presence, proximity and participation is constituted in relation to multiple, mostly unshared offline practices. In the subsequent section, we articulate how the simultaneity of online practices with multiple, interconnected offline practices has organizational consequences, blurring boundaries, diverting purposes and leading to glitches and breakdowns in online organizing. Finally, we summarize our contributions to understanding the co-existence of online and offline in time, and their implications for interacting and organizing online. We give examples of where this co-existence matters, such as in shifting patterns of work and addressing future challenges, and we suggest new directions for research that builds on our theorizing of organizing across simultaneous online and offline practices.

Simultaneously Online and Offline: Embodied, material practices and interconnections

Online practice and offline practice are not symmetrical. An online practice, whether a fully online or hybrid meeting, cannot exist without the multiple offline practices within which its participants are bodily present in a material world. However, it is analytically useful, for our purposes, to distinguish the online practice, as a site of routinized social interaction with represented others, from the multiple interconnected offline practices. By doing so, we can give attention to the constitution of the online practice in these multiple simultaneously co-existing, but mostly unshared, offline practices; and can recognize the complexity of the new emerging forms of organizing.

In what follows, we briefly outline the concepts that we will use for theory building, namely: (i) embodiment (Ewenstein & Whyte, 2007; Strati, 1999; Styhre, 2010) and materiality (Cardoso et al., 2019; Edwards, 2003; Edwards et al., 2009; Star, 1999) in practices; and (ii) connections between practices (Czarniawska, 2002; Shove et al., 2012). To characterize such concepts, we largely draw on theoretical resources provided by practice theorists (see also Nicolini, 2012) working beyond the research traditions that focus exclusively on online practices.

Embodiment and materiality in practices

Like other scholars of practice, we treat embodiment and materiality as central to situated practices. Practice theories foreground the situated, material nature of practice, and the role of bodily senses (Ewenstein & Whyte, 2007; Strati, 1999). To approach online practices from this perspective is to bring into view their foundation in material things (Leonardi et al., 2012) with which individuals bodily interact and the places in which these interactions are situated. Yet, while offline practices involve a wide range of sensorial experiences (sight, sound, smell, touch and taste) (Ewenstein & Whyte, 2007; Strati, 1999), this is not the case online.

An online practice, such as a fully online meeting supported by video conference, is essentially a visual and auditory experience – based on the senses of sight and hearing, with some tactile engagement with the keyboard or other input devices. Participants interpret the images and shared information on the screen and infer what is important and what needs attention by mobilizing auditory and visual senses. Though online practices are incomplete, people are adept at making meaning and they experience their interactions online as practices. In these interactions, eyes (Styhre, 2010) and ears become a major source of sense-based knowledge, and audio quality is especially important (Whittaker, 1995), with breaks in audio challenging the continuity of participation. Though there is some access to the gestures that in offline settings are integral to and tightly coupled with verbal communication (Clarke et al., 2019), online organizing may lack the subtle cues from others that participants would experience in person.

By framing online organizing as grounded in embodied material practices, we draw attention to how the online experience is also supported by material things – the smartphone, laptop, computer screen, keyboard, earphones, camera, microphone, tablets, watches or wearables. These artefacts that individuals directly manipulate in offline practices are described by Shove (2016) as devices. Shove (2016) also explain how material things can be used or transformed through the practice as resources; or necessary for a practice but not directly engaged with by individuals as infrastructures. The video conference is supported by devices with which participants interact bodily, and also by less visible resources and infrastructures such as electricity, cables, servers and routers. Such material infrastructures become taken for granted in practices, and only recognized by participants when they do not function as expected or impinge on the experience itself (Cardoso et al., 2019; Edwards, 2003; Edwards et al., 2009; Star, 1999); for example, as internet connectivity issues are experienced, microphones are missing or audio is too loud. Thus, embodiment and materiality matter to online organizing: though physical environments remain mostly unshared among participants, material things contribute to shaping online practices in multiple and somewhat unpredictable manners.

Connections between practices

Through the video conference, unrelated practices can become connected, for example as people engage in a work meeting from home. Most extant research has examined the evolution over time of practices that belong to the same type, having dependencies or related purposes (Shove et al., 2012). Relatedly, Cooren and Fairhurst (2009, p. 124) have described how in offline meetings, material interactions in the ‘here and now’ are linked sequentially across space and time to other distant practices, including the ‘there and then’ of different meetings in the past or future. However, when meeting with others online, participants also experience being simultaneously in different practices: both ‘here’ offline in a lived reality and ‘there’ in an online practice. Thus, practices that may not be dependent or related become connected and co-exist in the moments in which social interaction takes place and organizing is negotiated.

Organization scholars have recently begun to explore the interrelations between online and offline as practices evolve over time. For example, in the study of the organizational response to social media commentary, Karunakaran et al. (2021) trace how online organizing (e.g. via online platforms such as Twitter and TripAdvisor) has offline consequences, as organizations adjust their practices to recalibrate risk, redeploy resources and redefine service in response to new accountability pressures. Similarly, Elmholdt et al. (2021) discuss the implications of a firm’s well-being initiative targeting the employees’ sleep habits via digital self-tracking. The authors show how the digital practices of self-tracking impact on employees’ offline practices in different ways. Some of the employees perceived the use of digital self-tracking as an option to gain self-control (empowerment), while the others saw it as a form of firm’s control (disempowerment). Relatedly, in their study on drone operators in war zones, Rauch and Ansari (2022) highlight the conflicting feelings that arise as remote work (through a virtual cockpit) disrupts meanings and moral values, and how this dissolves the traditional spatio-temporal boundaries between work and home.

In extending this work on the relations between online and offline practices, we draw on practice scholars suggesting that connections between practices change continuously, with individual practices and complexes of practices becoming linked and unlinked (Gherardi & Nicolini, 2002; Hui et al., 2016). They argue that individual practices unfold within configurations of practices, where diverse practices may become sequential in terms of their co-dependence and synchronization, or simultaneous through their co-existence (Shove et al., 2012).

As practices unfold sequentially across different places and times, moving from one place to another is also a move from one time to another (Czarniawska, 2002, p. 7). For example, as participants travel between in-person meetings, the journey across rooms, the lunches and coffee breaks provide a transition between sequentially organized activities. Being sequentially organized enables such practices to be kept spatially and temporally separate, with transitions between different modes of organizing (Söderlund & Borg, 2018; Wilhoit, 2017) enabled by the distinction between a ‘here and now’ and a ‘then and there.’ This transition enables collective sensemaking with both reflection and informal interaction arising in the liminal spaces (Shortt, 2015) between other sequentially organized practices. Distant but connected practices are, from the perspective of the focal practice, ‘then and there’, but they are experienced as local and bracketed in their own ‘here and now’ (Cooren & Fairhurst, 2009).

Multiple co-existing practices become interconnected as people come together and meet online through the video conference, and thus, participants can be conceived of as being simultaneously in different places at once. Shove et al. (2012) describe practices that are both co-located and co-existing as a ‘loose-knit’ bundles of practices that may influence each other at the time of performance and over a longer time-frame. They argue that it is not always easy to understand whether co-existing practices (such as engaging with the Internet and the family) are competitive or collaborative, noting that co-existing practices may bring diversions and interruptions, with the rush of diverse and unrelated activities making time itself harder to manage (Shove et al., 2012). Connections between practices can be broken as well as made. Where links between practices break down, they can become the focus of attention, or practices can simply become outcompeted by other practices. While Shove et al. (2012) do not specifically look at online and offline, we anticipate such challenges arising in the setting we theorize about (online and hybrid meetings), as diverse online and offline practices co-exist and are experienced simultaneously. We thus see online organizing as taking place within wider configurations of successive and simultaneous practices that are both offline and online. Within these configurations, the simultaneity of being here and there, offline and online, in the moments of social interaction and organizing has important organizational consequences.

Interacting Online: Presence, proximity and participation

Online interaction can be problematic. In this section, we draw on multiple strands of literature that deal with online interaction (e.g. virtual work, communication theory, digital practices). We theorize how the participants’ embodiment in multiple, but unshared, offline practices has implications for their social experience of interacting online. We are interested in such experience, insofar as it is constitutive of and inherent to online organizing (hence prefiguring and shaping online practices and their associated offline practices).

Consider a hybrid workshop that we experienced together as we presented a draft of this paper. One author talked to the audience in a conference room, while the others joined the meeting via video conference, experiencing it from different time zones and physical settings. At times the focus was the same across online and offline, but in the online environment the connection with the social practice (i.e. the discussion of this paper) could not be assumed – as indicated by this conversation recorded in the online chat: ‘Is anyone else online having difficulty hearing the speaker? Yes! Same here. Yes – not very clear. There is a slight echo for me as well. We're using a microphone now. Is this better? much better now. MUCH BETTER. Much better. Thanks, Much better, thank you! Great! Much better, thanks! thanks!’

While this chat largely involved interaction between the online participants, the contribution in italic was from a person in the room mobilizing a new device. What it illustrates is that the meeting was experienced differently by the participants in the room and those joining online via the video conference and is dependent on material practices. This meeting involved the northern and southern hemisphere, winter and summer, day and night. Although simultaneously together in the online meeting, while the author in the room went for coffee with others and continued the discussion in the break, the other authors were situated within different preceding and following practices.

We argue that the ways in which online practices are grounded in embodied, material offline practices – and interconnected with multiple offline practices – alters how the individual and the organization meet and interact. Specifically, we see the participants’ experience of presence, proximity and participation in online practices as grounded in multiple and interconnected, but largely unshared, offline practices. In a range of meetings – from hybrid meetings such as the example above to fully online video conferences – some participants may be together in the office while others are embedded in different locations. In these cases, participants may attend to their home life and, at the same time, engage in a work meeting. These emerging configurations of online and offline activities and practices have consequences for organizations as well as individuals. In what follows, we elaborate on how being engaged in online interactions shapes the participants’ experiences of presence, proximity and participation. We see these concepts (presence, proximity and participation) as relational, and constitutive of social interactions in online organizing.

Presence

Although we have conceptualized the online practice as separate from (but always interconnected with) offline practices, there is a particular characteristic of online practice that has led others to conceptualize it as one with offline practice (Cetina & Bruegger, 2000) or to focus on the collective action online (Czarniawska, 2004; Nicolini, 2007): the online experience is symbolically mediated through representations (Dourish & Mazmanian, 2013). The place, person and social interaction are represented, turned into digitally encoded data, sent out and received, sometimes across continents. The inhabitation of place – with the weather and the flies, spiders, plants and other forms of life with which we share the planet – is absent.

Yet, participants in an online practice often have a sense of ‘being there’. The experience of presence, however, cannot be taken for granted but varies across interactions, depending on specific circumstances of the interaction at hand (Oh et al., 2018). In a video-conference meeting, for instance, a participant might be (more or less) absorbed in the online practice and become (more or less) aware of their embodiment in a physical space. Also, they might feel (more or less) connected to their virtual self – i.e. the digital representation of their actual self. When the virtual is perceived as the actual self, the image and/or sound stand(s) for the person and act(s) for them. Although the body is missing, the participant perceives the digital representation as them (Belk, 2014, 2016). The extent to which participants are immersed in the video conference and identify with their virtual selves, in turn, shapes the nature and course of the social interaction at hand.

Importantly, participants in an online practice such as a work meeting via the video conference might be more or less able to experience ‘social presence’ (Oh et al., 2018). When socially present, they interact through the represented selves and feel a sense of being together. They do so by developing interpersonal affinities and relationships, evaluating the engagement of others, and soliciting feedback from colleagues and supervisors. Participants in online interactions might take more or less time to build social presence, depending on their material devices and infrastructures, as well as on their competent and habituated interactions in mediated environments.

Compared to offline interactions, however, participants in online interactions experience a different type of sociality, appearing as ‘talking heads’, and being unable to eat and drink together, to sit around the table together, or to walk and talk together. While present in online organizing via the video conference, participants inhabit physical spaces (and materials, places and times) that remain largely unshared. In such settings, the inferences made by participants, about the situation and the other participants, might be inaccurate due to missing non-verbal and social cues. This is exacerbated as some participants may switch off their microphones and videos and listen in, while engaging in different and unrelated offline practices. Social presence may also be lost when the communication through ‘talking heads’ becomes highly asymmetric, with large numbers of attendees and small numbers of direct participants or presenters (Licoppe & Morel, 2018).

In our example of the paper development workshop, the online participants experienced a reduced sense of ‘being there’, when they could not hear the presentations and discussion, and became more aware of the mediated nature of their social interaction. Social presence was also fragmented across online and offline environments: online participants were visible to each other, but not to the offline participants in the room (who were also invisible to them). Among online participants, social presence was amplified through using the chat function while observing the same workshop activities and sharing the experience of connection issues. On the other hand, offline participants experienced a heightened sense of social presence among themselves, as they stopped for a coffee break, engaged in ‘side chats’ and voiced comments that they did not feel comfortable giving to the whole group. Although it was not the case in our paper development workshop, this fragmentation of social presence across online and offline participants might hinder the social interaction.

Hence, a complex set of patterns of presence arises in online organizing via the video conference, as participants might be more or less able to immerse in the mediated interaction, identify with their virtual selves and build a social presence with others online (and offline in the case of a hybrid meeting). This is more complicated than offline practice, where presence is often equated with being embodied physically in the room. In online interactions, presence cannot be taken for granted – not even when participants identify with their virtual selves. While building connections is challenging in any setting, participants in online organizing might want to employ deliberate actions to achieve social presence with represented others, and with unseen participants in the room. Examples are soliciting feedback from invisible participants (see also Whyte et al., 2022) or using multiple cameras to show the presenter, the presentation and the audience in the room to online participants.

Proximity

What is proximate in offline practice may be literally or metaphorically ‘to hand’ and available, where nearness and remoteness are described in the phenomenological sense – i.e. what is near is that which is attended to or matters to a person (Hafermalz & Riemer, 2020). In an online meeting via the video conference, what is physically near to hand is different across participants: for some participants, this might be the laptop on a dining table, a notepad and a keyboard, whereas for other participants this might be the smartphone, the sofa, and others who are engaged in a range of unrelated practices (e.g. children, partners and family members).

Yet, in online work that enables a sense of ‘being there’, what is physically far away may also be made to seem close. Spatial and temporal boundaries become dissolved through this ‘distanciated intimacy’ (Rauch & Ansari, 2022, p. 84), which may redefine values as it provides a sense of proximity at a distance. Thus, the simultaneity of being ‘here’ (offline) and ‘there’ (online) alters what is perceived as near and far across configurations of sequential as well as simultaneous practices. It allows for online participants in the meeting to be experienced as proximate, similarly to material artifacts such as the keyboard.

The nature of space and time becomes both important and troublesome online (Uhlin, 2022). Nicolini (2007) explores how telemedicine stretches out practices that were previously predicated on their proximity in space and time, which in turn leads to alterations in the practices of medicine. Groleau et al. (2012) and Lanzara (2009) show how, in work practices as different as architecture and law, emerging and institutionalized practices interact in time and over time, leading to contradictions and re-enactments that challenge the system at hand. We similarly observe how the simultaneous experience of an online practice with offline practices that are quite different (e.g. in purpose) can decouple these practices from other practices to which they were previously connected.

Simultaneity in time has consequences also over time: for example, participants whose organizations shift to remote work might increasingly come to experience the office (as a physical workplace) as loosely connected and ‘remote’, thus feeling at a distance, with little connection, far away, or even removed. During the Covid-19 pandemic, with work practices becoming improvised from across different households, the office space might not even be evoked as part of the online organizing. Relatedly, the sense of being close is also affected by time zones, where the video conference may be simultaneously experienced in the morning and evening by different participants, as was the case in our paper development workshop. Hence, as organizing shifts to online practices (Lanzara, 2009, 2016), the role of specific institutionalized spaces and places becomes more tenuous over time, reconfiguring how wider practices are interconnected.

Importantly, what seems proximate and close to hand affects the experience of social presence in online organizing. Scholars suggest various strategies to increase nearness between participants in online practices, including asking about local contexts, referring to personal details and providing quick responses (Hafermalz & Riemer, 2020). The concept of nearness connects to ideas of identity, with participants engaging with and giving attention to what they see as relevant. This, in turn, draws attention to how inclusive practices can be achieved in online organizing, for example by creating new interactive spaces (e.g. via a range of asynchronous ‘chats’, messaging systems and social media) or by enabling high-quality video and audio in a video conference.

As new proximities are formed, there is a danger that the real-world consequences of online organizing are seen as distant and thus are under-recognized. This is especially concerning as practices of future making – i.e. imagining and materializing a future state of things – are increasingly carried out in online environments (Whyte et al., 2022). Here, the participants’ detachment from materials, places and other people might result in a lack of shared knowledge, with negative consequences on the futures of organizations and societies alike (Whyte et al., 2022). This detachment is not just physical, but can also be moral, where participants in online meetings lose track of reality, for instance by failing to appreciate the impact of their decisions on others (Rauch & Ansari, 2022) as well as on future generations and the natural environment (Whyte et al., 2022).

Participation

Participation online gives the sense of being actively involved in a video-conference meeting. Participants play a range of roles across online and offline practices: for example, in an online meeting, they may be managers, decision-makers or team members. At the same time, they will have different roles in the interconnected offline practices where they are embedded – for example in the home environment, they may be parents, friends or partners. Wasson (2006) points to how situations where there are two spaces of interaction (as online and offline) may have different interaction structures; Valo (2019) outlines multiple concurrent forms of communication to enable participation; and Oittinen (2018) describes how participants co-present in the same physical space can sustain participation, by negotiating alignment and affiliation when there are problems with the technologies for the online meeting.

Because of the simultaneity of co-existent online and offline practices, active participation (i.e. the sense of being aware of others and things) may shift backwards and forward between these practices. During a video-conference meeting, for example, participants may reduce their level of active participation as they become engaged in unrelated offline practices, (e.g. getting their children ready for bedtime); or in other online practices (e.g. answering email or writing documents). New patterns of attention emerge (see also Ramos, 2019) within this simultaneous participation in online and offline practices. As attention shifts, tasks may retain residual attention, where ‘Every time task switching or multitasking occurs, a portion of a person’s attention remains on tasks other than the one at hand’ (Kissler et al., 2021, pp. 1–2).

In performing a practice, a participant’s attention may thus become fractured, given to the intensity of the gaze of colleagues on the screen, to their own image on the screen, or to aspects of local organizing that demand attention. Also, the sense of presence online diminishes in large meetings, as participants experience the meeting as audience, rather than as active participants. Participants may also feel less able to engage, socialize and actively participate. In some video-conference meetings, participants may become silenced and invisible. In other video-conference meetings, however, the relationship between the watcher and the watched may become more multidirectional (Zorina et al., 2021), with some participants having an impact on the visibility and inclusion of others. For example, in our paper development workshop, online participants saw and interacted with each other, but had limited visibility of the participants in the room. In this case, it was a participant in the room who helped to include participants online when they lost audio.

Organizing Online: Blurred boundaries, diverted purposes, glitches and breakdowns

By framing participants in online meetings as being both ‘here and there’, we seek to highlight the online practice as a distinct practice, a place of interaction, while also recognizing the multiplicity of other interconnected offline practices in which participants are embodied and engage with places and materials (without which the online meeting could not exist). In what follows, we elaborate on the wider organizational implications of being simultaneously ‘here and there’, with participants embedded in multiple but mostly unshared offline practices while they negotiate organizing online. Specifically, we suggest that the simultaneity of online and offline practices leads to the blurring of boundaries between practices, to diversions of purposes, and to glitches and breakdowns in online organizing.

Blurring boundaries

Because of their simultaneity, online and offline practices inevitably influence each other. The boundaries between them blur (Rauch & Ansari, 2022), causing participants to simultaneously experience activities that were previously kept apart spatially and temporally, for example with new interactions between their private and professional roles. This has implications in role transitions – seen as the process of disengagement from one role to the engagement in another (Ashforth et al., 2000). For example, a parent can get their children ready for school while they listen to their managers and colleagues. This is also discussed in the literature as a contamination; for example, as a result of less uninterrupted time, there may be ‘overlapping between private life and work, which leads to greater contamination of personal concerns and work duties’ (Palumbo, 2020, p. 771). Contaminations are unintentional and potentially harmful transfers across practices; for instance, where an online meeting reveals information about home lives or where simultaneity of different activities does not allow uninterrupted focus. However, as participants use video-conference technologies, the blurring of these boundaries can be greater than a simple contamination, with profound implications for identities, engagement, social judgements and the jurisdiction of the corporation.

The blurring of boundaries brings together activities that had previously been separate spatially, such as work and home. As questions arise about where the jurisdiction of the corporation legitimately starts and ends, individuals use home spaces for different purposes (Shortt, 2021). Between the domestic and the corporate, they may be more or less able to cope with the blurred boundary (e.g. Derks et al., 2016), and hence more or less able to negotiate organizing online. For instance, a participant on mute with the video off, multitasking to get children ready for school, is no longer visible to colleagues and may be seen as relatively disengaged. There may be social judgements made in the video conference about the secondary tasks that participants are undertaking, where such assumed activities inform the social understanding of employees’ politeness and appropriateness in the work context (Marlow et al., 2016).

The blurring of boundaries also brings together activities that had previously been separate temporally. Notably, participants may join in the same global meeting from their mornings and evenings. However, these co-existent online and offline practices, whether related or not, seep into each other and interact, creating shifting configurations of practices. As a consequence of the blurring boundaries, participants in online organizing via the video conference might seek to reconstruct the separation between online and offline practices (as well as enacting togetherness across online practices). For example, they might wear formal clothes for online meetings from the home, or create a workspace that is separate from other spaces of the home (Klein & Watson-Manheim, 2021). Such actions are attempts at disentangling the online practice of a meeting and its offline devices (laptop, notepad, screens and keyboards) from other simultaneous offline practices.

Offline practices to which online organizing is intrinsically linked may have unrelated purposes (as is the case of work- and home-related practices) but, as boundaries blur, they may increasingly become related. Participation in an online practice is a form of limited presentation or being seen, in which only part of the offline physical practice is viewable in the online shared practice. This visible ‘front of house’ (Goffman, 1956) has behind the scenes the corresponding ‘back of house’ of offline physical practices that are not visible to others, but that increasingly develop to support participation online (for example through ready-to-hand notepads, pens, and coffee). Thus, an online practice such as a work meeting via the video conference may trigger related offline practices, as well as being simultaneous with online/offline practices that have unrelated purposes. Over time, there is a growth in the number of physical artefacts that support the online practice. In working from home during the pandemic, corners of the home were transformed into makeshift and increasingly durable office environments.

Post-pandemic, the idea of ‘hybrid practices’ is emerging to represent new configurations of home and work practices that blur the boundaries between online and offline. In a hybrid meeting, for instance, some participants are together in a conference room, and others dial in from the home. Yet, the blurred boundary is difficult to accommodate in hybrid practices, where the ability to communicate across media may require a speaker to reiterate questions for the online audience, or an offline speaker may hold the floor and be unable to read the body language of online participants (e.g. as to when to stop speaking). Although participants are mostly able to make meaning when operating within multiple practices, dwelling and navigating in each with relative ease (Wasson, 2006, p. 125), the simultaneity of unrelated practices challenges the negotiation of online organizing. As we discuss further below, it may also divert purposes.

Diverting purposes

In a diversion, the purpose of a practice, such as the work meeting, is taken off course by the interconnections with other simultaneous practices. The online practice of a work meeting by video conference is susceptible to such diversions: although participants are all in the meeting, they are also engaged in many other practices in their diverse locations. A diversion happens in time and has consequences over time, as events in the present change the direction that plays out into the future. For instance, interruptions such as a participant commenting on features in the background or an uninvited additional participant (e.g. a family member, colleague or pet) that appears on the screen become diversions where they take the practice off course.

Whether practices are competing or collaborating in these diversions can only be understood from longer-term effects: notably, the comments on a home environment might build rapport and understanding between participants or they may frustrate others who want to focus on the main purpose. The purposes of an online meeting might become especially difficult to pursue, when they are threatened also by contaminations from other online practices: for example, the use of an online post-it note software may initiate a discussion of how to navigate online, taking the nature of the conversation far from the main reason for the video conference.

Shove et al. (2012, pp. 93–94) argue that loosely rather than tightly knit configurations of practices might be more prone to accommodate diversions, because they are not constrained by temporal order and path dependency: ‘In these situations temporary defection, multi-tasking and contamination between practices is perhaps more likely than when practices are held together by strong routines.’ Hence, participants in an online meeting might be able to adjust to diversions, by temporarily juggling practices that are unrelated or that threaten to disrupt online organizing. When diversions can be recovered in the moment, they may cause no lasting consequences on the performance of a practice. However, under-recognized diversions may take practices progressively off course. Thus, we contend that, when purposes become diverted, substantial effort can be required to recover and bring the practice back to its main purpose. This requires taking remedial actions (Whyte et al., 2022) to prevent participants from making unsustainable or even dystopic decisions.

It should be remarked, however, that diversions can occur in multiple directions. The online meeting can be diverted by, and in turn can divert, a range of unrelated online and offline practices – e.g. chatting, cooking, exercising – to which it is loosely knit. The configurations of such practices might change over time, as diversions can realign purposes and forge links between previously unrelated practices (Shove et al., 2012). For instance, online organizing might realign the purposes of offline practices as participants adjust their homes to accommodate the emerging practice of video conferencing.

Glitches and breakdowns

Although being simultaneously online and offline blurs spatial and temporal boundaries, the connection between online and offline practices is fragile. Online practices are supported by a material infrastructure (Shove et al., 2012): participants in the video conference are connected through routers, servers and devices such as smartphones and laptops. Glitches occur, in which one or more participants become aware of the technology, and the material infrastructure that supports the online practice. Where these glitches occur, participants make minor adjustments, as in the example of the paper development workshop, where they prompted a person in the room to make a change to accommodate the online participants: ‘We’re using a microphone now. Is this better?’

However, occasionally there are breakdowns in which the online experience of presence, proximity and participation is affected, and in which there is a rupture in the practice that needs to be repaired. Taken-for-granted infrastructures (Cardoso et al., 2019; Edwards, 2003; Edwards et al., 2009; Star, 1999) that support an online practice become noticed when the internet goes down, the software malfunctions, or data does not synchronize, providing occasions in which participants consciously pay attention to the underlying materiality that supports their practice. We see these glitches and breakdowns as an intrinsic part of the online experience.

While diversions may be temporary detours in the purposes of practices, these glitches and breakdowns within a practice are caused by the materiality of the online practice, as well as its simultaneity with other practices. Glitches are experienced in the video conference, for example when microphones and cameras malfunction or when features of the system resist desired practices, by broadcasting background noise, or causing a participant to ‘freeze’, ‘break-up’ or disappear. In the hybrid video conference, it may leave a remote participant struggling to hear, or may leave a room full of participants looking at a screen rather than each other.

Such glitches and breakdowns can have diverse and heterogeneous impacts on the practices of online organizing. Sometimes they leave participants stranded in their offline practices and unable to access the online organizing. This scenario may cause other participants in an online video-conference meeting to discuss and make decisions about how or whether to reschedule or proceed with the conversation without those that have not appeared. Or online participants can be left struggling to access the offline activity, as occurred in the hybrid workshop we attended, prompting the conversations and sensemaking in the chat, starting with: ‘Is anyone else online having difficulty hearing the speaker?’

Hence, such glitches and breakdowns often lead to forms of exclusion and also divert the purposes of meetings toward resolving the glitches and breakdowns. While the glitch we experienced was resolved, in other cases, glitches with the technology may remain unapparent or seem unimportant to some participants. In another instance, a couple of the authors could not work out how to change the volume of the audio in a conference room used to access an online video conference, which was far too loud and caused physical discomfort, making it difficult to concentrate on the content of the online conversation. As there was no alternative solution found and the issue was only apparent in one of the interconnected offline practices, work continued but both the length and content of the meeting were significantly affected.

Concluding Remarks

Our work on being simultaneously ‘here and there’ situates online organizing in embodied material practices, It has implications for research on interacting and organizing across co-existing online and offline practices. As we discuss below, our contributions inform the emerging strand of research on the interrelations between online and offline practices, as well as related traditions of work on online interactions and organizing. In Figure 1 we outline the foundational ideas, main argument, theoretical development and contributions of our paper.

Figure 1.

Summary of our contributions.

Our theoretical arguments and developments concern both the experiences and practices of being simultaneously here (offline) and there (online). First, we argue that in online interactions (e.g. an online meeting supported by video conference), online practices are grounded in multiple and interconnected – but mostly unshared – offline practices. This allows us to theorize how online and offline practices co-exist in time by uncovering how they interrelate in the moments in which organizing is negotiated. Building on this argument, we theorize the participants’ experience of presence, proximity and participation in online practices. The experience of presence varies across interactions, depending on how participants are (more or less) absorbed in the online practice. Presence thus refer to how they may become aware of, and present in, the online practice and connected to their virtual self while being embodied in a physical space. We use the notion of proximity to theorize how online work allows participants in the meeting to be experienced as proximate, thus enabling a sense of ‘being there’ as spatial and temporal boundaries become dissolved through ‘distanciated intimacy’ (Rauch & Ansari, 2022, p. 84). Building on related studies (e.g. Oittinen, 2018; Valo, 2019; Wasson, 2006), we articulate how the simultaneity of co-existent online and offline practices impacts active participation (i.e. the sense of being aware of others and things) in online work.

Second, we unpack the wider organizational implications of being simultaneously ‘here and there’ by suggesting that it leads to the blurring of boundaries between practices, to diversions of purposes, and to glitches and breakdowns in online organizing. As online and offline practices inevitably influence each other, the boundaries between them blur (Rauch & Ansari, 2022), bringing together activities that had previously been separate spatially (such as work and home) and temporally (e.g. global meetings with participants in their mornings and evenings). Further, we note that participants of an online meeting may also engage in other practices in their diverse locations, for example commenting on what is happening in the background. In this diversion, the purpose of a practice is taken off course by the interconnections with other simultaneous practices, causing online participants juggle unrelated practices. We finally argue how the material infrastructure (Shove et al., 2012) supporting the online practices can lead to glitches and breakdowns and discuss their heterogeneous impacts on the practices of online organizing.

Thus, our contribution is twofold: we recast online organizing as embedded in multiple, mostly unshared, offline practices and, relatedly, we develop the implications of the co-existence of online and offline in time for the experiences and practices of organizing. This leads to several opportunities for further research. Notably, there is a need for empirical work to understand the shifting landscape of organizing across online and offline, its politics, and the construction of identities within it. Adopting a practice perspective (Schatzki, 2001) future research could shed light on the unfolding assemblages of online-offline practices, and trace how mundane practices of online organizing such as the video conference may produce larger social phenomena. This is important, as organizing is increasingly carried out in online environments, where participants lack shared knowledge of people, materials and places (Whyte et al. 2022). Such a lack of shared knowledge, in turn, might produce unintended consequences, such as the making of futures that are unsustainable and dystopic. Further research is needed to suggest remedial actions, and to turn online practices (such as the work meeting via video conference) in a place where participants can produce desirable futures that address societal challenges (Gumusay & Reinecke, 2022).

Future research could also use our theorizing to study a wide variety of material, embodied practices within which online organizing is situated, and the material interactions that are fundamental to, but hidden in, their practices. This is significant when addressing grand challenges such as climate change: online practices such as the video conference have a hidden reliance on resources and infrastructures (electricity, internet). Additional work is needed to trace hidden material interactions (across devices, resources and infrastructures), and to surface their politics and implications for organizing. Hidden infrastructure, may, for example, connect those in an online practice with other unrelated online practices, as images, audio and other data become accessible to large software providers, who own the software that become the means of communication used.

While we focus on the work meeting via video conference, we expect our theorizing to be generalizable to a range of forms of online and offline practices in which there is a video-conference component (e.g. in hybrid work). This is the case in many meetings across large corporate businesses, governments, not-for profits, universities, start-ups, and leisure and family contexts in which participation is not co-located, triggering different emerging configurations of in-person and online participation. Our theorizing suggests a range of opportunities for scholars to examine such forms of online organizing that involve (as Uhlin (2022) also notes) interacting with represented people as well as other co-located people.

As hybrid practices emerge that bring together online and offline in new ways, there are emerging asymmetries between participants as well as practices. For example, in online work meetings, some participants’ experience of the meeting becomes co-existent with home life, while for others it is embedded in the work day in the office and collegial interactions over coffee or lunch. There is an opportunity, for scholars of virtual work and communication, to examine these aspects by looking at extreme cases, such as start-up software companies, or open-source software projects, that involve programmers working predominantly online. Here, there might be elective and non-elective uses of the home for work and technologies of online organizing such as the video conference. As organizing becomes actively negotiated in the moments of being simultaneously here offline and there online, these new emerging patterns of work might reproduce or alter patterns of inequality.

To understand how the individual operates in both online and offline practices when at the screen, we see an online meeting as both a shared practice and a site of social interaction, but also as simultaneously and inextricably connected with multiple offline practices. There are opportunities for scholars in related theoretical traditions that have studied online and offline practices to extend this theorizing. For example, scholars in the strategy-as-practice tradition can build on our contributions to extend understanding of how the video conference makes board meetings, presentations, working meetings and strategy workshops (e.g. Jarzabkowski & Seidl, 2008; Paroutis et al., 2015) hybrid rather than purely offline practices.

Likewise, we welcome discussion of whether an online video-conference meeting is, as we argue, one practice (albeit an incomplete one) situated in multiple offline practices, or if, as Uhlin (2022) argues, it is better understood as multiple practices. Our work on being simultaneously here and there raises new questions for scholars about how coherence is created across these practices, about what is and is not part of the practice, and about the ‘penumbra of not quite realised realities’ (Law & Lien, 2013, p. 363) that exist in all practices.

Pulling the field of view back from the computer screen enables us to theorize how the organizing taking place in an online meeting co-exists with a multiplicity of offline practices through which participants connect and engage with this meeting. Such scholarship is timely, as the video-conference meeting has become a pervasive medium of organizing. It is important as organizing becomes actively negotiated in the moments of being simultaneously here offline and there online. As these offline and online practices co-exist in time, various new configurations of practices emerge across work and home contexts. Examples include those through virtual or augmented reality as well as standard video-conferencing facilities, and for games and parties and co-watching television online as well as for work. Our contributions are generalizable to such new and emerging forms of online organizing in which people come together online, where these involve simultaneously being here in an offline practice and there in an online practice.