Paper short abstract

This paper examines how hybrid and remote workers in Amsterdam imagine a “good workplace” and “good workday.” Drawing on ethnography in co-working spaces, it shows how place mediates material, affective, and moral dimensions of work, shaping how neoliberal ideals of self-fulfilment are enacted.

Paper long abstract

With a particularly high number of hybrid and remote workers in the Netherlands, everyday choices of work environment participate in a broader reconfiguration of work as a site of self-fulfilment and affective satisfaction. Drawing on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in Amsterdam as part of the ReWorkChange ERC-project, this paper examines how hybrid and remote knowledge workers imagine a “good workplace” and, correspondingly, a “good workday.”

Based on extensive participant observation in co-working spaces and interviews with their workers, the paper traces how remote and hybrid workers make sense of their working days and how these processes are entangled with the material and immaterial dimensions of commodified workplaces. The analysis focuses on how work environments are selected, valued, and invested with meaning, highlighting ‘place’ as a key medium through which ideas of “good work” are enacted.

Building on Kathi Weeks’ (2011) critique of the work ethic as a moral framework that ties self-fulfilment and social worth to productive labour, the paper extends this argument to the context of hybrid and remote work by asking how workplaces inform, and are informed by, changing imaginations of what makes a working day feel meaningful, successful, or satisfying. Engaging with the contemporary co-working office as a space where place itself becomes a central commodity (Jansson, Fast, and Andersson 2026), the paper shows how such environments operate as moral infrastructures that shape how ideals of self-fulfilment, produced within neoliberal conditions, are aligned with place-based consumption through work, thereby reimagining what it means to have a “good” workday.