The inclusive potential of activity-based working: The case of disability
通过35个访谈，研究挑战了活动导向型工作能自动提升包容性的假设，发现残疾员工因设计阶段被排除而面临空间排斥，真正的包容需要普遍灵活性和更高无障碍标准。
Organisations are increasingly adopting activity-based working, replacing assigned desks and private offices with open, shared workspaces while shifting some tasks to employees’ homes. Management promotes these changes through explicit ‘efficiency-gain claims’ and subtler promises of flexibility and de-hierarchisation, thus making an implicit ‘inclusion-gain claim’. Drawing on 35 interviews, this study challenges the inclusion-gain assumption by examining activity-based working through the lens of visibility. The case of disabled workers reveals how the nature of disability and impairments complicate visibility in diverse and often ambiguous ways. Our findings show that while perceptions of diversity have increased with activity-based working, meaningful inclusion relies on universal flexibility and higher accessibility standards. Yet, disabled workers’ exclusion from the design phase resulted in retrofitting and exceptional territoriality, threatening inclusion. We contribute to the flexibility–visibility debate by showing that flexible organisational spaces not only influence the visibility of employees in terms of work recognition through spatial dispersion but also shape the visibility of embodied differences through spatial othering. Finally, this study reconceives disabled individuals and their allies not as passive users but as active re-designers of ableist workspaces, redefining visibility as a socially constructed, contested process shaped by the spatial and organisational structures of work.