The Home as Workplace

This paper explores the resurgence in western countries of the use of the home as a place of work. Using data from the European Working Conditions Survey it shows that by 2015 about 1 in 6 EU workers worked at home at least some of the time, this proportion being much higher in northern and western states and increasingly among men in non-manual occupations in those contexts. It argues that this trend supports an extension of traditional analyses of housing as both a consumption and an investment good to its use as a capital good akin to factories and offices. Faced with a more complex trade-off, households are adapting the decisions they make about their housing; in particular, freed, completely or in part, from the need to commute to work, their locational decisions. The paper concludes that the use of the home as a workplace leads to many important areas of investigation for housing studies researchers.