Temporalities of working homes and work-life balance in the context of the (post) COVID hybrid work

Seminar abstract

The Covid-19 crisis has been pictured as a multi-domain work-life shock event. Since March 2020, working homes spread drastically, engaging most white-collar workers to relocate work at home irrespective to their prior use of telework. Traditional division of times and spaces became blurred, and ICTs became rapidly essential for coordination. Also, the crisis was not only a matter on confinement but rather a chain of lockdowns making difficult the emergence of sustainable routines. While one could say the Covid-19 crisis is a temporally located episode, some research argues that telework will stick. It becomes therefore relevant to question the effects of a higher frequency of homeworking on work-life balance (WLB).

As suggested by many scholars, time is the most prevalent sort of conflict between work and life. However, time is more than clock-based but rather is subjectified. It is also a matter of individual and collective experiences that shape actions. In this vein, we examine the temporalities of working homes in times of pandemic. Through the successive episodes of the crisis, we investigate strategies deployed by actors to re-balance an unbalance episode. We also examine how such strategies evolve over time. Along this process, we discuss two contributions: (a) Time is central to WLB and relates to both the evolution of strategies over time and time management itself and, (b) WLB is the result of a continuous re-regulation process through which the collective regulation of activities in times and self-regulation over time continuously interact.

How to attend this seminar

This seminar is free to attend with no need to book in advance.

Please join us in person at the Essex Business School (Colchester Campus) in room EBS.2.35. This seminar will also be available online via Zoom.

We look forward to you joining us by either format on Wednesday 28 September 2022 at 1pm.

If you have any questions please do contact the organiser Dr Sophie Hales.

Speaker bio

Dr Michel Ajzen

Michel Ajzen, PhD in Management, is Research Manager of the labor-H Chair in Human Management and New Ways of Working (UCLouvain, Belgium). He is lecturer at UCLouvain (Belgium) and Université Catholique de l’Ouest (France). His courses approach contemporary work, HR and organizational issues in an interdisciplinary and critical perspective. His research investigates new ways of working and managing, in a critical and interdisciplinary perspective. From this perspective, he questions the reconfiguration of (a) social relations in times and spaces; (b) traditional roles (e.g. managers, workers and trade unions); and (c) work-life balance and attitudes to family and work.