“Oh! Teleworking!” Regimes of engagement and the lived experience of female Spanish teleworkers

Abstract

This research explores female teleworkers' domestic and work experiences in their day-to-day lives. We draw on focus groups and interviews carried out in Spain and use the pragmatic regimes of engagement framework developed by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot to analyse them. Their model further develops contributions from post-humanist discourse (specially from G. Deleuze, F. Guattari and A. Badiou) and from the so-called “empirical ethics”. This allows us to explore important issues about the temporal-spatial and material worlds that shape the daily lives of these women, their perceived agential capacities, and their moral and ethical considerations regarding telework. Our paper contributes to the existing critically oriented (qualitative, interpretative) body of work that examines teleworkers’ lived experience by providing and illustrating important clues for examining ethical issues on work–life balance and gender roles.