The Multi-Site Expansion of Work at Home: In Search of Time Savings

Résumé En

Alongside Leroy Merlin Sources, we have been studying, for the past 4 years, the multi-situated development of "Work at Home". As part of a global dynamic of changes in work, it raises new issues of sociability and affectivity in space and time. For our intervention, we would particularly like to focus on the relationship to time (Lefebvre, 2019). As a result of the use of new technologies and new methods of personnel management, the subordination of the worker no longer stops at the workplace but also extends to the home (Tremblay, 2001; Tremblay, Chevrier and Loreto, 2006). Within this framework, the physical and intellectual availability of individuals would no longer have temporal and spatial limits. Space and time are social products. This implies that rhythms (Claire Revol, 2014; Lefebvre, 2019) carry meaning. Short/fast or long/slow rhythms manifest themselves in repetitions and breaks, synchronicity and desynchrony. Rhythmics gives clues as to status, each figure having, according to its characteristics, its own rhythmics (Author, 2004). The analysis of daily life in relation to time in the use of housing and work thus reveals the diversity of relationships of domination (status, productive logic, etc.). In this sense, "Work at Home" can be a way to circumvent and fundamentally challenge the so-called traditional social rhythms of separation between work and private life, but also between the legal and the illegal, the local and the global, or between work and non-work. Thus, it questions public housing policies and the paradigm of understanding work. From 2015 to 2019, we conducted a longitudinal study combining phases of qualitative and quantitative surveys, and in situ observation including the use of drawing and video.