The Pivotal Role of Workarounds for Navigating Challenges in Digital Work

Work is becoming increasingly digitalized and change, underscores a critical dichotomy; the design of the digital infrastructure can either facilitate or impede the efficacy of workers in their everyday tasks. When the digital infrastructure poses obstacles, workarounds emerge and over time, become an integrated component in work routines. The aim of this paper is to shed light on workarounds in different professional practices through our cross-case study we explore workarounds within the public sector. The contribution is three-fold: (i) we provide and argue for four general types of workarounds, which we derive from the empirical data from longitudinal data; (ii) we conceptualize workarounds as practices of innovation, evolution, and responsibility in contemporary work, and; (iii) we provide a framework for analyzing workarounds as technology-oriented versus task-oriented and individual versus collective dimensions. The framework can be used by researchers and practitioners to identify tensions and to contribute to an increased understanding of the dilemmas, difficulties, and opportunities that an intensification of digitalization of work through digital infrastructures that call for extensive workarounds entails.