Digital technologies have made it possible for people to work from literally anywhere in the world, as long as they have the right devices and Wi-Fi (Torten et al., 2016). At the same time, the number of self-employed workers is growing rapidly. This group usually does not have an office in a firm they can go to every day, to work. Digital technologies open up an array of possibilities. Working is possible anywhere and anytime. Self-employed workers can choose to work from home, a rented hot desk in a co working space, in coffee-shops, hotel lobbies, and even on the beach in a sunny resort on a beautiful island. In this chapter, the focus lies on self-employed workers who work in hotel lobbies that were not primarily designed as co-working spaces.

In this essay, we contend that new ways of working imply a crisis both of communities and politics in our societies. We introduce the concept of 'co-politicisation' to make sense of the potential highly transformative political power of managerial agency in society. In the context of ongoing work transformations, managerial agency increasingly seems to become a political agency, through its potential to transform society and the sense of togetherness. However, in the meantime, politics has entered into crisis. Each of us has the possibility to express their own, individual voice, but without building, in turn, any meaningful or resonant collective and community. We argue that a temporal approach is needed to understand such a crisis of community and of the politics. To that end, we introduce Paul Ricoeur (1985)’s thought on a ‘crisis of the present’ that we apply to new ways of working. We conclude by suggesting that new ways of working may be missing practices likely to produce the extra-temporality that managerial agency needs to perform. Without this extra-temporality, the managerial agency of new ways of working just keeps weakening our sense of togetherness.

Digital nomadism refers to a mobile lifestyle in which freelancers, digital entrepreneurs and remote workers combine work with continuous travel. In this chapter, we draw from Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) to explore whether digital nomads can be seen to constitute a new form of leisure class. In particular, this entails problematising digital nomadism through four dimensions, namely differentiation, emulation, visibility and institutionalisation. Drawing from a qualitative analysis of the mainstream promotional discourse underlying digital nomadism, we show the existence of a whole set of economic activities based on selling a dreamed work/lifestyle to others. These commercial propositions, which rely on online storytelling and visibility, constitute efficient means of emulation that contribute to framing images of success. Our ‘Veblen-inspired’ analysis, we contend, generates a source of questions not only relevant to the study of digital nomadism, but also to miscellaneous aspects of the new world of work.

Over the past few years, much has been written on the changing world of work, with discussions focusing, for instance, on the rise of automation (Spencer 2018), changes in the nature of the employment relationship (Sweet and Meiksins 2013), the (failed) promises of the gig economy (Cant 2019; Wood, Graham, Lehdonvirta & Hjorth 2019) or new ways of collaborating and co-producing (de Vaujany, Leclerq-Vandelannoitte & Holt 2020). Importantly though, these discussions are not novel, neither are the phenomena they seek to describe. The history of work is full of déjà vu. Communities, participatory systems, horizontality, democracy at work and nomadism are far from being new topics per se. In the nineteenth century, the Arts and Crafts Movement, socialist utopian communities, anarchy and Marxism had already involved public debates around these topics (see Granter 2016; Leone and Knauf 2015; Tilly 2019). Yet, there is clearly a renewed interest for these themes in research attempting to grapple with the multifaceted nature and the complex meaning of contemporary work (see for instance Aroles, Mitev & de Vaujany 2019; Fayard 2019; Simms 2019; Susskind 2020).