LIVING A DISTRIBUTED LIFE: MULTILOCALITY AND WORKING AT A DISTANCE

Abstract

In the last few years, new collaboration and communication technologies have led to a deterritorialization of work, allowing for the rise of new work- and lifestyles. In this article, I use my own transition from the life of a corporate researcher to that of a multilocal mobile consultant for tracking some of the patterns I see in a changing cultural and economic environment where work and workers are no longer tied to a specific place of work. My main interest lies in identifying some of the behavioral shifts that are happening as people are caught up in and attempt to deal with this changing cultural landscape. Writing as a knowledge worker who now moves regularly from a work–home place in the Silicon Valley of California to another in the tropical lowlands of Costa Rica, I use my personal transition as a lens through which to trace new, emergent patterns of behavior, of values, and of social conventions. I assess the stresses and joys, the upsides and downsides, the challenges and rewards of this work- and lifestyle and identify strategies for making such a life successful and rewarding. Throughout, there emerges an awareness of the ways in which the personal patterns described reflect wider trends and cumulatively illustrate global transformation of workscapes and lifescapes. These types of local patterns in fact constitute the on-the-ground material reality of global processes that initiate and sustain widespread culture change and emergent societal transformations.