Becoming a Digital Nomad: Identity Emergence in the Flow of Practice

Digital technologies have redefined many jobs and are challenging how people define themselves at work. Scholars have long argued that people’s work identities are mainly derived from the organizational environment in which they are embedded. But advances in digital technologies, in combination with a global restructuration of labor markets, have led a large segment of the workforce into alternative work arrangements outside of traditional, hierarchical corporations. Understanding work-related identities and in particular the ways in which they emerge thus becomes an important topic in the context of digital work. Building on an ethnographic study of digital nomads, this research-in-progress shows that digital workers, not associated with an organization or profession, are nonetheless able to construct work identities. Our preliminary findings illustrate how identity is emerging in the flow between two opposing practices and how this flow is continuously shaped by material, spatial, and temporal forces.