When Technology Changes the Physical Workplace: The Creation of a New Workplace Identity

In recent decades, there have been many advances in digital media and technologies that have disrupted professions traditionally rooted in physical and print media as their core competency. Often, digital transformations of such professions not only change the way these professionals collectively define themselves, but also dramatically alter the physical work environment in which they have formally shaped their work roles and interactions with physical and print media (e.g., photographers increasingly work with photo editing software rather than in darkrooms, journalists increasingly work in electronic rather than print platforms, etc.). In this new digital era, how do these professionals adapt and define themselves? Drawing upon preliminary data analysis from a longitudinal case study of a group of library professionals who transitioned to an all-electronic library building (i.e., a library without physical books), we propose an emerging process model of workplace identity creation in order to address this question.