Office Attachments: An Affective Economic Geography of Working from Home during COVID-19 Lockdowns in Ontario, Canada

Across geographic contexts, COVID-19 lockdowns represented a significant shift in working practices for office workers. In Canada, approximately 40 percent of the working population was working from home by March 2020, with a figure as high as 80 percent in some office-based sectors. White-collar employment-based work overlapped in new ways with unpaid socially reproductive work in the home that, while school closures continued, created additional challenges for parents. Although today some firms are demanding returns to the office, others continue to allow working from home for some of the work week. This article examines interview data with high-status office workers in Ontario, Canada, who began working from home for the first time in March 2020. Contributing to cultural and feminist economic geography, it uses the concept of attachment to analyze how employees experience working from home and the possibility of returns to the office. Many described this shift in emotional terms, exploring how their feelings about office and home changed. Attachments and detachments—to the office and to other objects—were complex, overlapping, and ambivalent. I argue that the shift to working from home represents an opportunity to better understand the cultural and economic significance of the office as the assumed normative location of white-collar work.