Teleworking has transformed our lives since the COVID-19 pandemic and continues to shape the way we work today. Hundreds of millions of workers across the globe now work remotely, the majority of them experiencing entirely new hybrid models—combining some days in the office with others working from home. In just a few years, many advanced economies have reached teleworking rates up to four times higher than those recorded before the pandemic. This rapid expansion has brought both opportunities and challenges, transforming work arrangements while also generating new potential risks and inequalities. Today, far from the exceptional circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic, this special issue aims to encourage innovative research on remote work by presenting empirical evidence on the following topics:
- Personal Networks: Remote work introduces new dynamics among relatives and colleagues. We welcome analyses examining its impact on processes such as social support, conflicts, forms of control, or interruptions at work.
- Careers: Studies focused on teleworking trajectories, their evolution over time, and their effects on career progression.
- Productivity: Studies assessing whether teleworkers (fully remote vs hybrid) perform better, worse, or similarly to in-presence workers.
- Gender and parenthood: Investigations into gender inequalities related to access to teleworking, its management within families, and the implications for mothers’ career.
- Occupational health: studies investigating how teleworking conditions influence health outcomes, either positively or negatively, including their effects on occupational risk factors.
- Mobility: studies focusing on mobility and changes in commuting patterns.
- Disability: Research exploring whether and how teleworking improves access to employment for people with disabilities or with functional limitations.
- Methodological innovations: innovative approaches, including experiments, longitudinal analyses, and network methods, to better understand the complex dynamics of teleworking.
- Platformization: studies examining online usage dynamics and virtual communities, as well as analyses of platform governance, regulatory frameworks or surveillance mechanisms
This special issue will make publicly available data from the project The Empty Office: An International Study of Teleworking, which collected quantitative data from over 4,000 workers in Europe and 28,000 of their personal relations, along with qualitative material from a follow-up study involving 40 teleworkers interviewed one year later.
We particularly encourage researchers interested in this topic to utilize these data—though submissions based on other data sources are also welcome.
We invite contributions from diverse disciplines, including sociology, economics, psychology, public health, and organisational studies, to advance knowledge on the societal and individual implications of remote work.
Submission Schedule
the selection process consists of two stages:
1. Extended Abstracts (September 15, 2025):
Authors should submit an extended abstract (min 1000 words) outlining the key research question, data, methods, and expected findings. Submissions should be sent to mattia.vacchiano@ unige.ch, stephane.cullati@unifr.ch and nicola.cianferoni@seco.admin.ch An initial screening will assess alignment with the special issue’s theme and methodological rigor.
2. Peer Review (mid-2026):
Selected papers will proceed to a double-blind peer review process. Full manuscripts must be submitted by 31 March, 2026.
In preparing their manuscripts, authors are advised to consult the following editorial guidance here.
Editors
Mattia Vacchiano is a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Geneva. He holds a PhD in Sociology from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He was SNSF Senior Research at the University of Lausanne (2018-2021) and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Buenos Aires (2016). His research focuses on labor markets, mental health, social networks and the life course, especially among young people. He is currently leading the project The Empty Office, an international and interdisciplinary project analyzing the effects of remote working on peoples’ lives.
Stéphane Cullati, PhD, is a sociologist and Senior Lecturer in epidemiology and public health at the Population Health Laboratory (#PopHealthLab) of the University of Fribourg. He has published more than one hundred fifty publications in collaboration with scholars around the world on the relationship between health and society, from the perspectives of social inequalities in health, the life course, social policies and public health. His research has notably examined the impact of life course socioeconomic conditions on health, including employment and working conditions. As President of the European Society for Health and Medical Sociology (ESHMS), he contributes to this project by fostering collaborations among researchers in health sociology research, health policy and social epidemiology. ESHMS also organizes the biennial European Conference of Health and Medical Sociology.
Nicola Cianferoni holds a PhD in Socioeconomics and specializes in sociological research on working conditions. He is the author of the book “Working in Retail: Will the Working Day Become a Social Issue Again? » (Seismo,2019), as well as being the co-editor of “Social Dialogue in the Gig Economy: A Comparative Empirical Analysis” (Edward Elgar, 2023), alongside Jean-Michel Bonvin and Maria Mexi. In his role as a scientific collaborator at the Occupational Health Administration of the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) in Switzerland, he addresses issues related to new forms of work organization, such as teleworking, in relation to workers’ health protection. He is also a senior researcher at the Institute for Sociological Research at the University of Geneva
Source: Understanding the impact of remote working | Springer Nature Link (formerly SpringerLink)