ReviewFrontiers in public health2026
Perpetual connectivity as digital labor: a conceptual reframing of the always-on work culture.
Review in Frontiers in public health, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Orientation: Digital communication technologies have transformed the temporal and spatial organization of contemporary work, embedding continuous availability into organizational life. Despite considerable scholarly attention, the labor involved in maintaining perpetual digital availability remains under-theorized. Motivation for the study: HRM scholarship has predominantly treated connectivity as a contextual feature of digital work rather than as a labor process with direct occupational health implications. This framing obscures connectivity's function as a mechanism of attentional appropriation that warrants HR governance. Research purpose: This article reframes perpetual connectivity as a distinct form of digital labor. It argues that the always-on culture constitutes a site of value extraction and attentional appropriation that requires occupational health-grounded HRM theory and governance. Research design: A critical integrative review and theory synthesis was conducted, following Jaakkola (1). The synthesis integrates Labor Process Theory, Digital Sociology, and HRM scholarship. Findings: The article develops the Perpetual Connectivity Labor Model (PCLM), which specifies how organizational connectivity expectations generate informal digital labor through the mechanism of attentional labor extraction. Eight propositions guide empirical testing. Practical/managerial implications: The model offers HR practitioners a basis for governing digital responsiveness norms, recognizing informal digital labor within workload systems, implementing right-to-disconnect frameworks, and configuring HR analytics to monitor connectivity patterns. Contribution/value-Add: The article introduces attentional labor extraction as a novel explanatory mechanism, specifies the occupational health pathway from connectivity expectations to attentional depletion, and articulates a governance framework for digital work.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.