• Hybrid work arrangements have become increasingly established. • We establish the notion “ home-ing for work” to capture how work transforms the home. • Processes of home-related anchoring, rearranging and distancing were reinforced. • Hybrid work arrangements reveal gendered implications in partly novel ways. In recent years, telework has established itself at higher levels among office workers, largely due to the pandemic years with their lasting effects in terms of new ways of organizing daily life. This has also meant that the office space weakened as an anchor of daily life, in favour of the home space. Consequently, the home has undergone significant changes. The changing role and use of the home are in focus in this paper, which examines the long-term adaptation and remaking of the home and home life as work and home increasingly merged, and hybrid work arrangements were established. Moreover, we examine how increased time spent at home has gendered implications. Theoretically, we establish the concept of home-ing for work to emphasize the home as practical “doing” when work and home life concur. Empirically, we conducted a longitudinal real-time interview study of pandemic-induced teleworking women and men in Sweden. Findings reveal how the intersection of work and home reinforced the role of the home in daily life, spurring newfound imaginaries of and routines within the home, leading to the sub-processes of anchoring, rearranging and distancing. We find that home-related processes have gendered implications that differ between full-time work from home and hybrid work arrangements.
Louise Brundin (Sun,) studied this question.