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This paper takes as its starting place the rich context of many knowledge workers today—highly distributed, increasing project focused, typically atypical days, infrastructural—and attempts to push past extant descriptions of their practices as ‘flexible’. Using empirical data informed by a practice theory lens, we expand the understanding offlexibility with regard to work by augmenting how worker disposition, as well asthe ability to engage with agility in dynamic circumstances, should be considered as a factor when examining and designing for this population. We make several contributions of interest to the wider CSCW community. First, we distinguish between those who showcase flexible practicesand those who proactively orient aroundflexibility. We call this second group ‘elastic workers’. Second, we raise new questions for us as scholars and designers keen to exploit the conceptual and pragmatic intersection of technology and work. These questions create opportunities to explore different methods for understanding complex phenomena such as flexibility, as well as understanding how we might design for this phenomenon with more foresight in the future.  \nKeywords: Flexible work, Elastic, Knowledge work, Future of work, Practice, Worker, Infrastructure  \n1. Introduction  \nStudies of knowledge work and the shifting dynamics of knowledge workers are well described in the literature (e.g., Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2014; Cnossen and Bencherki 2018; Spillman and Brophy 2018) . As a whole, this body of research documents a professional landscape that is increasingly cognitively-based, expansive (i.e., globalized, inter-organizational), decomposed (i.e., expertise-driven, project based), and reliant on specialized expertise (Barley and Kunda 2006b; Davenport 2005; Spinuzzi 2015) . Within this context, it showcases an evolution of workers' practices that CSCW scholars have analyzed for decades. Knowledge workers, such as engineers, architects, digital media consultants, financial  \nAuthors are listed alphabetically as a means to indicate equal authorship.  \n628 Erickson Ingrid et al.  \nconsultants, and other specialists, increasingly act as ‘organizations of one’, actively participating in formal (‘gig’ economy or contract-based work) 1 and informal labor markets (intraorganizational, see Spinuzzi 2015) to gain terminal project-based assignments in which they interact with multiple clients and collaborators simultaneously (Ciolfi and de Carvalho 2014; Harmer and Pauleen 2012; Kietzmann et al. 2013; Kleinrock 1996; Nylén et al. 2014; Su and Mark 2008; Tilson et al. 2010) . More often than not, these assignments, once received, can be executed anywhere in the world, often in modular professional environments like coworking spaces.  \nThere is no one name for this work style or type of worker, and indeed scholars have not necessarily helped to narrow the range of descriptions or monikers. When mobility is a particularly accented aspect of a worker’s life, he tends to be labeled as a‘mobile worker’; tautologically, these workers are shown to use mobile infrastructures frequently (Ciolfi and Lockley 2018; Ciolfi and Marc McLoughlin 2017 ; Cousins and Robey 2015; de Carvalho 2014; Francisco et al. 2018; Koroma and Vartiainen 2018;Yuan et al. 2010). When a worker’s mobility spans a wide distance or blurs work-life boundaries, the label is often shifted to ‘digital nomad’ (Czarniawska 2013; D’Mello and Sahay 2007; Jarrahi et al. 2019; Pittinsky and Shih ","cbCaiu9MhhdlqBC2","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaiu9MhhdlqBC2","pdf",332600,27,"English","# Introduction\n## Flexible work practices in shifting knowledge-work contexts\n## Flexible work as a conceptual fit for agile, dynamic practice","[{\"question\":\"What does the paper aim to improve over prior descriptions of flexible work?\",\"answer\":\"It extends existing accounts by treating flexibility as influenced by worker disposition and the capacity to engage in agility under changing circumstances.\"},{\"question\":\"Who are “elastic workers” in this study?\",\"answer\":\"“Elastic workers” proactively orient their practices toward flexibility, distinguished from those who merely display flexible practices.\"},{\"question\":\"What new questions does the paper raise for CSCW scholars and designers?\",\"answer\":\"It focuses on how technology and work intersect in understanding and designing for flexibility, including methods to study complex flexibility phenomena with greater future foresight.\"}]","Flexible Turtles and Elastic Octopi - Exploring Agile Practice in Knowledge Work | PDF",68]