Methodologial Approaches for Workplace Research and Management

This book explores a wide range of methodological approaches to examining various forms of workplace physical environments. It focuses on pressing questions regarding the relationship between the spatial component of the workplace, including its progressive hybridisation with other physical and virtual places, and its users, be they public organisations, private companies, or start-up businesses and solopreneurs.

International contributors address a range of methods that are applicable both in research and practice to confront the most cutting-edge workplace-related issues. The assumption is that work has been changing, thanks to the virtualisation of many activities, and that homeworking and hybrid working modes are expected to increase significantly after Covid-19. Thus, spaces hosting work need to adapt accordingly. Researchers and practitioners have been struggling to determine how much space will be needed by companies, what kind of space will better host different work activities, which workers are more suited for working from home, and which instead are more productive if they have an office-based working arrangement. The necessary evolution of the office should follow evidence-based decisions on the abovementioned matters, which are only possible through rigorous investigations. This volume aims to support these investigations, which call for inventive applications of qualitative and quantitative methodologies. By doing so the book will encourage solid practices and thorough research agendas in workplace design, management, and use.

Contributions come from different disciplines, including facilities management, real estate management, psychology, design, architecture, sociology, and organisation studies. Chapters highlight the importance of appropriate methodologies, borrowed from different fields, in addressing contemporary questions and developments in workplaces. By analysing the challenges and opportunities for conducting rigorous research in different workplace settings, this book will be critical reading for both academics and students, as well as for decision-makers and professionals who deal with workplace design and management.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Dr Chiara Tagliaro works as a fixed-term researcher and consultant in the Real Estate Center - Department of Architecture, Built Environment and Construction Engineering at Politecnico di Milano. Her research interests concern the design, management and use of workplaces, collaborative work practices, and the digitalisation of the real estate sector. She has been involved in two EU funded projects around these topics, namely: the COST Action CA18214 ＂The geography of new working spaces and the impact on the periphery＂; and the ERASMUS+ Strategic Partnership 2018-1-HU01-KA203-047744 ＂An innovative approach in workplace management education＂. She coordinates the Summer School on Workplace Management since its first edition in 2018. She organised the third TWR conference in 2022 in Milan, Italy.

Dr Marko Orel is an organisational sociologist who works as an assistant professor and a head of the Centre for Workplace Research (CWER) at Prague University of Economics and Business. He specialises in exploring the changing nature of the workplace and the transformation of work and work-related processes. In addition to that, Marko is currently exploring experimental, qualitative research methodologies. He recently guest-edited a special issue on workplace transformation at Emerald’s Journal of Corporate Real Estate, edited a volume on flexible workplaces that Springer Nature has published, and has published several chapters and research papers in journals such as World Leisure Journal, Mobile Networks & Applications, Review of Managerial Science and others.

Dr Ying Hua is an Associate Professor (tenured) in the Cornell Department of Human Centred Design - College of Human Ecology, and she is Director of the Cornell China Center. She is a member of the graduate field and advisor in the Cornell Baker Program in Real Estate; faculty fellow of the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future and the Cornell Institute of Healthy Futures, Vice-Chair of the Faculty Advisory Board of the Atkinson Center, and core faculty of the Cornell East Asia Program. Dr Hua leads the International Workplace Studies Program (IWSP) with both research and consulting work. Her research addresses design and management challenges across multiple phases of project life-cycle, with a particular interest in future work and workplace in the US, Japan and China. She has a track record of 17 papers indexed in Scopus (h-index 9), and has been a frequent speaker at international conferences and high-profile events.