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Paper short abstract

This paper examines workaway practices as a form of mobility enabled by remote work that plays a significant role in the reproduction of social inequalities in Milan, Italy. Workaway has become a marker of inequality embedded in historically situated practices of privilege and distinction.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines a form of mobility enabled by remote work that plays a significant role in the reproduction of social inequalities in Milan, Italy. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted within the ERC CoG project ReWorkChange, a comparative study of the social consequences of remote work across eight countries, the paper analyzes how “workaway” practices have emerged as new markers of social distinctions (Bourdieu 1984).

In recent years, Milan, the economic capital of Italy and the center of the more affluent Lombardy region, has experienced growing social inequalities. The paper focuses on the ability of middle-upper class families to spend the summer months working remotely from the seaside or mountains locations. Escaping the increasingly hot and unliveable urban environment of Milan is widely perceived as a privilege reserved for a minority of professionals who can benefit from so-called smart work and who often own second homes outside the city.

The paper further argues that these contemporary “workaway” practices extend and reshape long-standing patterns of class-based inequalities in Italy. During the twentieth century, a key marker of social distinction was the possibility for women and children to spend the summer months by the sea or in mountain locations. This practice was affordable to wealthy families with a single (male) breadwinner and access to second homes. Today, remote work reproduces and transforms this class-specific notions of good life, and functions as a marker of inequality that is embedded in historically situated practices of privilege and distinction.