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The purpose of this study is quantify the fast growing and dynamic population of workers known as digital nomads, workers who live a location agnostic, technology enabled lifestyle, traveling while living and working away from their home for extended periods of time. Since the pandemic, companies that embrace remote work policies are winning accolades. But along with the work-from-home crowd, there is another distinct group of employees that companies need to address: digital nomads – a rising new class of traditional job holders that have taken to the road. As human resources (HR) departments rewrite their policies for the remote workforce, it is critical that you put in place a digital nomad policy. Having a digital nomad policy will not only allow your company to attract and retain top talent but will also protect you from regulatory and legal risks.

The Digital Nomad data cited in this paper comes from the 2021 MBO Partners State of Independence in America study, which was fielded in July of 2021. This is the 11th consecutive year this study has been conducted. For the 2021 study, Emergent Research and Rockbridge Associates surveyed 6,240 residents of the USA (aged 18 and older). The survey results were weighted to reflect the demographics of the USA.

Today, the USA alone boasts 15.5 million digital nomads – a massive 112% increase from 2019 and 42% increase from 2020. With workers untethered from the office, the pandemic drove an increase in digital nomadism; however, the trend is here to stay. Corporations and HR teams need to take note and develop forward-thinking policies that will attract and retain talent.

Over the past three years, MBO Partners, in partnership with Emergent Research, have collaborated on an extensive digital nomad study that has attracted the interest of Harvard Business Review. The company’s larger State of Independence report is also the longest-running longitudinal study on the independent workforce. Despite the large and growing number of digital nomads, few organizations have formal policies and programs for them. MBO is the first to develop policies and programs to help HR teams embrace this new era of talent who want the freedom to roam.

This chapter provides a genealogy of the Gladue–Ipeelee principle of special consideration of Indigenous circumstances at sentencing. The principle is codified in the 1996 statutory requirement that “all available sanctions other than imprisonment … should be considered for all offenders, with particular attention to the circumstances of Aboriginal offenders” (s. 718.2e of the Criminal Code of Canada). Using the Foucaultian genealogy method to produce a “history of the present,” this chapter eschews normative questions of how s. 718.2e has “failed” to reduce Indigenous over-incarceration to instead focus on how practices of “special consideration” reproduce settler-state paternalism. This chapter addresses three key components of the Gladue–Ipeelee principle: the collection of circumstances information, the characterization of those circumstances, and finally their consideration at sentencing. Part one focuses on questions of legitimacy and authority and explicates how authority and responsibility to produce Indigenous circumstances knowledge was transferred from the Department of Indian Affairs (DIA) to Indigenous Courtworker organizations in the late 1960s/early 1970s. Part two identifies how authority shapes problematization by examining the characterization of Indigenous circumstances in the two eras, finding that present-day Gladue reports articulate an Indigenous history and critique of colonialism as the root cause of Indigenous criminalization, whereas DIA reports prior to 1970 generally characterized this criminalization as a “failure to assimilate.” Part three focuses on the structural reproduction of power relations by exploring historical continuities in judicial and executive-branch consideration of Indigenous circumstances, suggesting that the Gladue–Ipeelee principle reinscribes a colonial “mercy” framework of diminished responsibility. The author discusses how the principle operates in the shadow of Indigenous over-incarceration as a form of state “recognition” and a technique of governance to encourage Indigenous participation in the settler justice system and suggests that the Gladue–Ipeelee principle produces a governing effect that reinforces settler-state authority by recirculating colonial practices and discourses of settler superiority.

This chapter looks at how the concept of biopolitics can be used to understand the settler colonial legal orders. The focus is on the evolution of the definition of ‘Indian status’ in the Indian Act, which is the central piece of legislation in Canada’s Indian administration regime. Historically, the legal concept of Indian status was used as a way to constitute a population in relation to colonial sovereignty, and later was adapted as a mechanism to internally dividing the population through complex forms of legal domination. Scholars have turned to Michel Foucault’s studies of biopolitics and racism to understand how settler colonial sovereignty relates to a population on a territory. This chapter argues that Foucault’s analysis was radically historically embedded in a way that shapes its relevance to understanding settler colonialism. In Foucault’s original analysis, racism emerges as tool of the state in the relation between territory and sovereignty, which was characteristic in feudal Europe. In settler colonial legal orders such as Canada, however, sovereignty’s relation to the population is constituted in the absence of a prior connection to the land.