Home > Research > Publications & Outputs > ‘Business Code/Spaces’ in Digital Service Firms

Electronic data

  • Business code spaces in digital service firms - online version

    Rights statement: This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Geoforum. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Geoforum, 112, 2020 DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.03.018

    Accepted author manuscript, 582 KB, PDF document

    Available under license: CC BY-NC-ND: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

Links

Text available via DOI:

View graph of relations

‘Business Code/Spaces’ in Digital Service Firms: The Case of Online Multinational Fashion Retailing

Research output: Contribution to Journal/MagazineJournal articlepeer-review

Published
Close
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>1/06/2020
<mark>Journal</mark>Geoforum
Volume112
Number of pages11
Pages (from-to)13-23
Publication StatusPublished
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

The impacts of digital technology on the spaces and practices of firms are of increasing concern, yet we know comparatively little about how emerging digital business models affect the ‘business spaces’ of service firms. We draw on case study research within five leading online fashion retailers to identify interweaving virtual and physical spaces of online retailing that are expressed through intra- and inter-firm digital interdependency management. This allows us to build a conceptualisation of the ‘business code/spaces’ of digital service firms, i.e., the entanglements between virtual, information-rich and responsive networked infrastructures, and materially and socially situated infrastructures. The conceptualisation of ‘business code/spaces’ reveals how combinations of embedded interpersonal decision-making within office-based work communities, networked partners, their established processes and bureaucracies, as well as the physical restrictions of space and place together reproduce spatial fixes and local-global geographies, but in ways fundamentally defined by digital technologies and business models. Our conceptualisation of ‘business code/spaces’, therefore, contributes to research examining the inter- relationships between ‘the digital’ and business practices as well as work concerning global retailing.

Bibliographic note

This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Geoforum. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Geoforum, 112, 2020 DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.03.018