Working flexible still: remote work, hybrid work, and the future of work in Ontario’s technology sector

Abstract

In this thesis, I addressed three main topics directly. First, I examined the future of work discourse as it is shaped through expertise performances and particular work and worker framings, via event ethnography. Second, I investigated how looming restrictions on flexible remote work, together with continuing intensive layoffs, produced an association between flexibility and precarity among tech workers. Third, I explored how tech workers’ encounters with the flexibility paradox generates tension between resistance to and adoption of exploitative dimensions of being flexible. Between June 2023 and August 2025, I engaged in participant observation in future of work settings and semi-structured interviews with tech workers. Analysis was carried out both during and after this period. I present three standalone manuscripts that each develop my discursive and qualitative analysis of participant observation and interview data.

In this thesis, I examined the “future of work” as both a discourse and as flexible work practices. Temporally, my research spanned what can be described as the initial “post-COVID-19 era”: the period following easing lockdown measures and relative COVID-19 vaccination availability in Canada. I analyzed how the future of work discourse was constructed around long-standing and emergent anxieties concerning labour and the meaning of work, in both social and technical ways. To do so, I analyzed several future of work conferences and massively open online courses (MOOCs), professionally oriented events aimed at extending expertise. I also examined how particular flexible work framings and experiences, perceived value, and workers’ engagement with flexible work are shifting in the post-COVID context. Drawing on the example of tech workers in Ontario, Canada, I illuminate how flexible work has changed amid increasing precarity in high-status professional employment and rapidly evolving flexibility cultures.

This approach analyzes how flexible work practices are produced, reproduced, and internalized by workers. It highlights the long-standing and emergent processes through which flexibility has been naturalized as a self-rationalizing and self-exploitative force, even as it is sometimes contested. Rather than demanding less work or more equitable working arrangements, tech workers remained ambivalent toward flexible work’s ambiguity and paradoxical nature in their lives, even as the future of work continues to be premised on a narrow worker ideal in the face of change. Importantly, I argue that high-status professional work is increasingly shaped by flexible work practices that normalise precarity, overwork, and insecurity. While flexibility maintained certain benefits, it simultaneously generated forms of white-collar work that discipline workers toward self-management and self-exploitation.

I approached the future of work and flexible work as interdisciplinary concerns. By examining future of work discourse and flexible working practices among Canadian tech workers, I contributed to ongoing work in economic geography, labour geography, and the sociology of work that calls for closer attention to economic futures, variable forms of precarity across different kinds of labour, and the micro-level workplace and flexibility spaces. More broadly, I foreground culture’s role as a dominant rather than peripheral dimension of economic thinking. I conceptualized the future of work by its overdetermination and futurity, understanding the future as a process of becoming enacted in the present. I also conceptualized contemporary flexible work experiences not as a straightforward means of producing economic value, but as practices that shape work cultures, meanings, attitudes, and worker subjectivities. I argue that understanding future as a process is central to structuring and maintaining capital’s hegemony over labour, though not without resistance.