HYBRID lives: work, care, and technology among Britain’s hybrid working parents

Thesis

The emergence of hybrid work, in which employees divide their time between the home and the office, has transformed the possibilities for organising paid work around care. This thesis examines how hybrid work is lived, organised, and made sense of by parents in the UK, and how its promise of flexibility intersects with existing gendered divisions of labour and responsibility. Drawing on 48 interviews and 15 digital diaries with parents working in the tech and knowledge-based sectors, I show that while hybrid work enables parents to combine work and caregiving in care-oriented ways that were previously difficult or impossible, this reorganisation creates intensified demands that are predominantly shouldered by mothers.

Hybrid work relies on a distinct and often gendered form of labour, which I term coordinative labour: the ongoing temporal and spatial work required to organise, align, and sustain paid work and care across domains. Among hybrid workers, this labour is mediated through digital platforms and devices that enable simultaneity, interruption, and constant availability. It is embedded in gendered norms of responsibility; coordinative labour is disproportionately undertaken by hybrid-working mothers and those positioned as primary caregivers. The responsibility for coordinating work and family across multiple members of a household contributes to heightened strain, often experienced as stress, guilt, and overwhelm, and a dense experience of time. Despite this, many report a strong preference for hybrid work.

Coordinative labour extends into the hybrid workplace, where gendered norms of visibility, constituted through digital technologies, shape how caregiving is recognised at work and continue to favour workers with fewer care coordination responsibilities. In a context of gendered parental leave and inadequate childcare provision, hybrid work is often not only a preference but a necessity for primary caregivers to manage the demands of paid work and care. This reliance, and the increasing pressure to return to the office, reveals hybrid work as a fragile and individualised response to structurally gendered care arrangements.

This thesis reframes flexibility as a form of work that must itself be organised. The key conceptual contribution of this thesis, coordinative labour, extends feminist sociological scholarship on cognitive labour, the mental load, and gendered organisations by foregrounding how digital technologies, gender norms, and the structural context intersect to shape the lived experience of hybrid work.

Authors: Rodel, L

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-nz14mam7j
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English