The International Journal of Human Resource Management

Digital Nomadism and the Future of HRM: Rethinking Work, Workforce, and Workplace

Digital nomadism combines location-independent, digitally mediated work with sustained or recurring geographic mobility (Cook, 2023; Mancinelli, 2020). It has often been discussed as a lifestyle, tourism, migration, or mobility phenomenon, including in research on transformational travel, destination ecosystems, workation practices, and digital nomad visas (Bednorz et al., 2026; Dreher & Triandafyllidou, 2025; KC & Triandafyllidou, 2026; Mancinelli & Bozzi, 2026; Orel, 2021). Yet, digital nomadism also raises central questions for human resource management: how organizations attract, organize, support, govern, develop, and retain workers whose employment relationships, work locations, and social embeddedness are increasingly fluid (Nichols, 2022). This special issue invites HRM scholarship that treats digital nomadism as both a distinctive empirical setting and an analytically powerful context for rethinking work, workforce, and workplace in an international and digitally mediated economy.

The special issue is motivated by a simple premise: digital nomadism exposes the limits of HRM models built around stable organizational membership, fixed work sites, nationally bounded employment systems, and co-located employment relationships. It foregrounds the spatial, contractual, social, and institutional fragmentation of work and speaks directly to recent calls to rethink HRM in light of distributed, fragmented, and fluid work arrangements (Černe & Lamovšek, 2026). It also brings together developments that are usually studied separately, including remote and hybrid work, global mobility, platform and freelance work, flexible staffing, coworking, workation practices, digital infrastructures, destination ecosystems, and transnational employment regulation. In this sense, digital nomadism sits at the intersection of new global ways of working, technology-enabled change, and the shifting boundaries of talent management and careers (Cooke et al., 2023; Vaiman et al., 2021).

We therefore seek theory-driven conceptual and empirical papers that use digital nomadism and related forms of mobile, distributed, or location-independent work to advance HRM theory and practice. Recent reviews show that digital nomadism is a growing but still fragmented research field, with much of the literature developing outside HRM and organization studies (de Sousa et al., 2025; Gupta et al., 2024; Wang et al., 2024). At the same time, emerging work on digital nomads’ online conversations shows how this form of work is deeply connected to career management, community building, portability of career capital, and the broader future of work (Zikic et al., 2026). Papers should make clear how their arguments speak to HRM phenomena, systems, practices, functions, or outcomes. We are especially interested in contributions that move beyond describing digital nomads as a lifestyle group and instead examine the implications of mobile digital work for organizations, workers, HR professionals, and institutional actors.

Indicative topics and research questions

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

Rethinking work

• Work design, job demands and resources, autonomy, flexibility, isolation, insecurity, time-zone dispersion, infrastructure variability, and performance.
• Leadership, coordination, voice, psychological safety, performance management, and feedback in mobile and distributed work arrangements.
• The implications of digitalization, AI, algorithmic management, and digital platforms for where, how, and under what contractual conditions work is performed.

Rethinking the workforce

• Talent attraction, selection, retention, and employer branding for mobile and location-independent workers.
• Careers, employability, career self-management, protean careers, sustainable careers, and boundaryless or globally mobile talent pathways.
• Wellbeing, recovery, work-nonwork boundaries, social embeddedness, loneliness, identity, and community among digital nomads and other mobile workers.

Rethinking the workplace

• Onboarding, socialization, belonging, organizational identification, informal learning, and knowledge sharing when workers are geographically mobile.
• Destination ecosystems, coworking spaces, local communities, employers, governments, and intermediaries as actors shaping mobile digital work.
• Comparative research on digital nomadism across countries, regions, sectors, occupations, employment forms, and regulatory regimes.

Rethinking HRM governance and employment systems

• Employment relationships, psychological contracts, commitment, fairness, inclusion, and duty of care in remote, freelance, contractual, hybrid, or employee-based arrangements.
• International HRM, global mobility, digital nomad visas, taxation, labor law, social security, cross-border compliance, data protection, and institutional complexity.
• HR architecture and governance: balancing flexibility, autonomy, coordination, control, equity, risk management, and organizational support.

References:

Bednorz, J., Orel, M., & Solvak, M. (2026). What makes a digital nomad destination? The case of small states. Tourism Geographies, 28(1), 80–101.

Cook, D. (2023). What is a digital nomad? Definition and taxonomy in the era of mainstream remote work. World Leisure Journal, 65(2), 256–275.

Cooke, F. L., Dickmann, M., & Parry, E. (2023). Building a sustainable ecosystem of human resource management research: Reflections and suggestions. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 34(3), 459–477.

Černe, M., & Lamovšek, A. (2026). Work has changed, has HRM? Designing for the distributed, fragmented, and fluid era. Human Resource Management, 65(2), 305–324.

de Sousa, B. V., Bastida, M., & Vieira, E. (2025). Unraveling digital nomadism: A comprehensive bibliometric review of emerging research and trends. Journal of Global Mobility, 13(1), 1–25.

Dreher, N., & Triandafyllidou, A. (2025). Understanding digital nomadism: A three-level framework for migration studies. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 51(19), 4801–4820.

Gupta, S., Jaiswal, R., & Gupta, S. K. (2024). Digital nomads: A systematic literature review and future research agenda. Tourism Review, 79(5), 1179–1202.

KC, H., & Triandafyllidou, A. (2026). Digital nomadism and the emergence of digital nomad visas: What policy objectives do states aim to achieve? International Migration Review, 60(1), 71–92.

Mancinelli, F. (2020). Digital nomads: Freedom, responsibility and the neoliberal order. Information Technology & Tourism, 22(3), 417–437.

Mancinelli, F., & Bozzi, A. (2026). Workation destinations: “Re-imaging” tourism cities for digital nomads. Tourism Geographies, 28(1), 63–79.

Nichols, A. (2022). Digital nomads: A savvy enterprise’s newest HR frontier. Strategic HR Review, 21(6), 185–190.

Orel, M. (2021). Life is better in flip flops: Digital nomads and their transformational travels to Thailand. International Journal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research, 15(1), 3–9.

Vaiman, V., Cascio, W. F., Collings, D. G., & Swider, B. W. (2021). The shifting boundaries of talent management. Human Resource Management, 60, 253–257.

Wang, B., Schlagwein, D., & Cecez-Kecmanovic, D. (2024). Critical-theoretic review and research agenda on digital nomadism. Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 54, 1–20.

Zikic, J., Zupic, I., & Černe, M. (2026). Digital nomads in conversation: Reddit-based analysis and the future of nomadic versus migrant career journeys. International Migration Review, 60(1), 93–113.