Remote Control: Scripts and data sets

In this study, we demonstrate how the COVID-19 pandemic brought persistent changes in how working from home (WFH) is approached by employers in white-collar job domains. Analyzing 1.97 million Danish job ads between 2015-2023, we identify nearly 40 000 ads offering WFH, predominantly targeted at white-collar workers. We find that the outbreak of the pandemic created a disjuncture in the status of WFH as offers increased dramatically afterwards. To understand these changes, we constructed a semantic network of frequently co-occurring words in descriptions of WFH through which we interpreted word clusters and qualitatively examined ads. We identify various competing discourses that broadly fall into two categories: WFH articulated as a desirable perk for employees or as a regulated practice controlled by employers. The increase in WFH after the outbreak of the pandemic could have prompted a shift in dominant WFH discourses, and the conditions of work more broadly. Our analysis, however, reveals an increasing effort to specify WFH conditions, while the associated meanings remain largely stable. We suggest this highlights an effort by employers to maintain stability around the conditions of work, and that job ads function as initial disciplining of workers, shaping these conditions, including expectations surrounding WFH.