Paper short abstract

Remote and hybrid workers in Bucharest move between home and cafés as everyday workplaces. Based on ethnographic research, this paper shows how such mobility is shaped by classed and spatial practices, revealing how digitally enabled flexibility is unevenly lived in the post-socialist city.

Paper long abstract

This paper, based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted within the ReWorkChange project on the social consequences of remote work, examines how remote and hybrid workers in Bucharest navigate between home and cafés as everyday workplaces, and how these movements are shaped by class understood as a bundle of relational, spatial, and moral practices through which inequality is lived and reproduced (Carrier & Kalb 2015).

In a post-socialist city marked by housing inequalities and a growing specialty coffee scene, cafés function as regular, though not always affordable, sites of work for long-term residents. For many workers, working from home is constrained by small apartments, shared households, housing precarity, or social isolation, making cafés popular places of work.

Rather than treating home and cafés as separate workplaces, this paper takes workers’ mobility between them as its central focus. It asks when, why, and under what conditions particular places are chosen, showing how decisions about where to work emerge from negotiations between material constraints, such as housing, cost, and commuting, and the symbolic and moral work of performing a coherent and flexible life. Enabled by digital technologies, this mobility turns the choice of workplace into a recurring practice shaped by practical demands and aspirational concerns about productivity, comfort, and belonging.

Engaging with debates on post-socialist middle-class formation (Crăciun & Lipan 2020) and cafés as infrastructures of class-making (Petrovici & Faje 2019), the paper argues that the flexibility associated with remote work is unevenly lived and produced through classed and spatial practices in Bucharest.