Adam Piotrowski: Working here and elsewhere: An analysis of telework arrangements

In the wake of the Covid-19 crisis, work is set to evolve and frequently take the form of remote working for a significant proportion of employees. There is such a consensus that we are seeing business stakeholders (HR directors, middle managers, affected employees, etc.) considering how to organise these new ways of working. According to the hypothesis that inspires this thesis, the period ahead will be one of individual and collective work necessary to arrange all these elements in order to combine them as effectively as possible, i.e. to enable both productive organisations and individual employees to reconcile the distant and the present, the immediate and the mediated, the formal and the informal.

This thesis therefore hypothesises that it is arrangements – between legal frameworks, physically organised spaces, technologies, forms of collectives, but also employee locations, the configuration of their housing and family life, etc. – that are at stake. These arrangements should be studied in terms of their trajectories of invention or development, which could imply that, rather than a once-and-for-all establishment of new frameworks, we are dealing with learning processes.