Stephens et al. Banning Mobile Devices at Work Proceedings of the 11 th International ISCRAM Conference – University Park, Pennsylvania, USA, May 2014 S.R. Hiltz, M.S. Pfaff, L. Plotnick, and P.C. Shih, eds. Banning Mobile Devices: Workplace Policies That Selectively Exclude Can Shape Crisis Communication Keri K. Stephens The University of Texas at Austin keristephens@austin.utexas.edu Jessica L. Ford The University of Texas at Austin jessica.ford@utexas.edu ABSTRACT There is a growing need to understand how mobile devices are used to reach people in a crisis. This study focuses on how work organizations play a gatekeeping role in how their employees receive crisis information. Relying on research in the digital divide and organizational justice, this study compares two different types of organizations and their policies banning or allowing mobile devices at work. Three major themes emerged: having omnipotent supervisors, being powerless workers, and experiencing information holes. These themes highlight the burden placed on organizations to create more inclusive digital policies to ensure that employees do not fall through the net of crisis management systems. Additionally, these findings necessitate new discussions among crisis and emergency management scholars that include the current understanding of the digital divide, specifically as it relates to digital inequality in the workplace. Keywords Crisis management, Digital divide, ICTs, organizational justice, mobile devices, policy INTRODUCTION A robust body of research has begun to illustrate how new media—e.g., Twitter, text messages—have expanded opportunities to reach people during a crisis (Hughes and Palen, 2009; Schultz, Utz, and Goritz, 2011; Tapia, Moore, and Johnson, 2013; Veil, Buehner, and Palenchar, 2011). We have learned how the public shares what they know, almost immediately, as a crisis unfolds (Sutton, Palen, and Shklovski, 2008) and how people respond in evacuations (Mileti and Peek, 2000). We also know that organizations use people’s mobile devices to send them emergency alerts in addition to sharing ongoing crisis information (Stephens, Barrett, and Mahometta, 2013). But what happens when organizations restrict employee access to new media? On the surface, creating organizational policies limiting digital use at work may be a logical solution for managers seeking to recapture the time wasted by employees using social media for personal reasons (Griffiths, 2003). But consider the implications of having groups of employees without access to technologies during a crisis. The digital divide has been extensively studied over the past decade (see Hargittai and Hsieh, 2013) and it has moved beyond a binary distinction separating people on the basis of access to technologies. Most early work on the digital divide identified socioeconomic factors as key drivers of access (DiMaggio and Hargittai, 2001). Contemporary perspectives offer the term digital inequalities (Hargittai and Hsieh, 2013) to reflect the gradations influencing technology use. In this study, we further expand these gradations to focus on the implications of organizational digital inequalities and how they influence crisis management. When organizations impose digital policies that restrict access to mobile devices at work (Half, 2009; Zachry and Ferro, 2013), the resulting digital divide is due to structural implementations, not social determinants. Mobile Devices and Work Mobile devices have changed how we work as well as our work-home boundaries (Wajcman, Bittman, and Brown, 2008). This is especially the case with urgent information, since much of the mobile communication research has identified security, safety, and coordination as the core uses of mobile devices (e.g., Ling & Yttri, 277