Performing Identities in Unsettled Digital Work: The Becoming of ‘Digital Nomads’

‘Digital’ ways of working and organising are undeniably changing the nature of work that is becoming ever more uncertain, unsettled, and fluid. These changes call into question our understanding of work and our conceptions of worker identity. In this paper, we ask the question: how is digital worker identity performed in such fluid and unsettled work settings? To explain digital worker identity performance, we investigated digital nomadism as an extremely fluid and unsettled case of digital work. We studied digital nomads, high-skilled professionals who use digital technologies to work remotely and lead a nomadic lifestyle, in a multi-sited ethnographic field study. Based on a process-relational perspective, our analysis reveals how the identity of digital nomads, their “becoming”, is performed as an ongoing process. This process unfolds along the flow of three lines of identity performance—journeying, workliving, and digital reassembling. The lines of identity performance, as products of our theorising, are proposed as a foundation for a process-relational theory of digital worker identity.