Abstract
Working from home (WFH) is a new reality and norm in today’s work culture. COVID-induced lockdown introduced the concept of WFH for many people. Blurring home and workplace boundaries was a prominent cause of disorientation in people’s lives. Hence, WFH becomes a significant phenomenon to explore as it raises the fundamental question of body and space in shaping people’s experiences. To study this, the researchers designed a phenomenological inquiry and examined the lived phenomenon of WFH during the COVID lockdown. Borrowing theoretical concepts from philosophers Martin Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, they aimed to understand human experiences from an embodied perspective. They interviewed a few adults (age group 27–50) in three urban Indian cities during the first phase of the COVID-19 lockdown. The participants’ experiences were transcribed, and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) was conducted. The IPA themes highlighted their varied lived experiences and lifeworld, such as distractions in working from home, their changed routines, habits, and social interaction. The findings are discussed through phenomenological psychology concepts such as embodied cognition, body memory, extended self, shared empathy, intersubjectivity and pre-reflective bodily intelligence in coping. The study’s contribution is that it advances a methodological understanding by interpreting people’s experiences from a phenomenological view of being-in-the-world in which the individual is not an isolated entity but is in the world/placed in the world with other people and the environment.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
According to the phenomenologist Polkinghorne (1989), phenomenological researchers should interview between 5 and 10 participants who have all experienced similar events (phenomenon) to capture and interpret the commonality of their experiences.
Related information on habitual memory is in ‘Habitual body and memory in Merleau-Ponty’ by Casey (1984).
According to Husserl’s model of empathy and projection (as cited in Zahavi, 2014), there are three ways of intending an object- signitive is the linguistic acts of referencing and pictorial acts work through representation (picture).
Body-subject is the inherent capacity of the body to direct behaviours of the person intelligently and thus function as a special kind of subject that expresses itself in a pre-conscious way usually described by words, such as mechanical, automatic, habitual, and involuntary (Seamon, 1980).
Body Schema infers that the situational spatiality of the body, as opposed to the dualistic subject (body)- object (world) view (Merleau-Ponty, 2006).
Adam (2013) talks about the concept of time, in which she says there are two kinds of time- quantitative one and qualitative one a body clock which is rhythmic, synchronised with nature. However, the commodified clock time desynchronises the body rhythm. The origination of this commodification began in industrial times with the rise of capitalism, where ‘time became money’.
In her dissertation on ‘Solitude,’ Arndt (2013) writes about women’s experiences with solitude in which she also mentions how women’s experience with solitude helps them get close to nature, pay attention to the environment and close the gap of alienation with the non-human natural world, and their bodily experience. In the narratives written by women in solitude, she found that women in their journey of solitude, women learned to appreciate the art of ‘less is more,’ as they adopted a less consumptive mode of living in the forest.
References
Adam, B. (2013). Timewatch: The social analysis of time. Wiley.
Andriessen, J. E., & Vartiainen, M. (2005). Mobile virtual work: A new paradigm. Springer.
Arndt, K. L. (2013). A room of one’s own, revisited: An existential-hermeneutic study of female solitude (Doctoral dissertation, Duquesne University).
Barnacle, R. (Ed.). (2001). Phenomenology. RMIT University Press.
Borah Hazarika, O., & Das, S. (2021). Paid and unpaid work during the Covid-19 pandemic: A study of the gendered division of domestic responsibilities during lockdown. Journal of Gender Studies, 30(4), 429–439.
Casey, E. S. (1984). Habitual body and memory in Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology and the human sciences (pp. 39–57). Springer.
Casey, E. S. (2009). Remembering: A phenomenological study. Indiana University Press.
Chauhan, P. (2021). Gendering COVID-19: Impact of the pandemic on women’s burden of unpaid work in India. Gender Issues, 38, 395–419.
Chenhall, R., & Glaskin, K. (2013). Sleep around the world: Anthropological perspectives. Springer.
Coveney, C. M. (2014). Managing sleep and wakefulness in a 24-h world. Sociology of Health & Illness, 36, 123–136.
Crary, J. (2013). 24/7: Late Capitalism and the ends of sleep. Verso Books.
Dahiya, A. (2020). The phenomenology of contagion. Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, 17(4), 519–523.
Dolezal, L. (2020). Intercorporeality and social distancing: Phenomenological reflections. The Philosopher. http://hdl.handle.net/10871/122131.
Dreyfus, H. L. (2014). Skillful coping: Essays on the phenomenology of everyday perception and action. OUP Oxford.
Dreyfus, H. L., & Hubert, L. (1991). Being-in-the-world: A commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time. MIT Press.
Ekirch, R. A. (2001). Sleep we have lost: Pre-industrial slumber in the British Isles. American Historical Review, 106, 343–387.
Ekirch, R. A. (2015). The Modernization of western sleep. Or does Insomnia have a history? Past and Present, 226, 149–192.
Fuchs, T. (2012). The phenomenology of body memory. Body Memory Metaphor and Movement, 84, 9–22.
Fullagar, S., & Pavlidis, A. (2021). Thinking through the disruptive effects and affects of the coronavirus with Feminist new materialism. Leisure Sciences, 43(1–2), 152–159.
Hardley, J., & Richardson, I. (2021). Digital placemaking and networked corporeality: Embodied mobile media practices in domestic space during Covid-19. Convergence,27(3), 625–636.
Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, trans.). Blackwell.
Heidegger, M., & Schmidt, D. J. (2010). Being and time: A revised edition of the Stambaugh translation. State University of New York Press.
Hochschild, A., & Machung, A. (2012). The second shift: Working families and the revolution at home. Penguin.
Honore, C. (2006). In praise of slowness. Law Prac, 32, 34.
Hünefeldt, T., & Schlitte, A. (Eds.). (2018). Situatedness and place: Multidisciplinary perspectives on the spatio-temporal contingency of human life. Springer.
Husserl, E. (1983). Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy: First book: General introduction to a pure phenomenology, vol. 2. Springer.
Husserl, E. (1999). The essential Husserl: Basic writings in transcendental phenomenology. Indiana University Press.
Illouz, E. (1997). Consuming the romantic utopia: Love and the cultural contradictions of capitalism. Communication Research Trends, 17, 25–25.
Jardine, J., & Szanto, T. (2017). Empathy in the phenomenological tradition. In H. Maibom (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of philosophy of empathy (pp. 86–97). Routledge.
Jarrett, C. (2020). How lockdown may have changed your personality. The BBC Future. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200728-how-lockdown-may-have-changed-your-personality.
Kazmi, S. S. H., Hasan, D. K., Talib, S., & Saxena, S. (2020). COVID-19 and lockdown: A study on the impact on mental health. Available at SSRN 3577515.
Kumar, A., & Nayar, K. R. (2021). COVID-19 and its mental health consequences. Journal of Mental Health, 30(1), 1–2.
Malpas, J. (2018). Place and experience: A philosophical topography. Routledge.
Memon, M. A., Shaikh, S., Mirza, M. Z., Obaid, A., Muenjohn, N., & Ting, H. (2022). Work-from-home in the new normal: A phenomenological inquiry into employees’ mental health. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 20(1), 48.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (2006). Phenomenology of perception. Routledge.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of perception. Routledge.
Messenger, J. C. (2017). Working anytime, anywhere: The evolution of telework and its effects on the world of work. IUSLabor. Revista d’anàlisi de Dret del Treball, (3).
Morse, K. F., Fine, P. A., & Friedlander, K. J. (2021). Creativity and leisure during COVID-19: Examining the relationship between leisure activities, motivations, and psychological well-being. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 609967.
Polkinghorne, D. E. (1989). Phenomenological research methods. In Existential-phenomenological perspectives in psychology: Exploring the breadth of human experience (pp. 41–60). Boston, MA: Springer US.
Sartre, J. P. (1976). Critique of dialectical reason (A. Sheridan-Smith, Trans.). NLB.
Schneider, L. K. (2010). Local workers, global workplace, and the experience of place. Phenomenology, 5(2), 209–223.
Seamon, D. (1980). Body-subject, time-space routines, and place-ballets. The human experience of space and place, 148, 65.
Seamon, D. (2018). Life takes place: Phenomenology, lifeworlds, and place making. Routledge.
Singh, J., Sood, M., Chadda, R. K., Singh, V., & Kattula, D. (2021). Mental health issues and coping among health care workers during COVID-19 pandemic: Indian perspective. Asian Journal of Psychiatry, 61, 102685.
Trigg, D. (2022). Covid-19 and the anxious body. Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology, 5(1), 106–114.
Van Grunsven, J. (2021). Perceptual breakdown during a global pandemic: Introducing phenomenological insights for digital mental health purposes. Ethics and Information Technology, 23(Suppl 1), 91–98.
Varea, V., & González-Calvo, G. (2020). Touchless classes and absent bodies: Teaching physical education in times of COVID-19. Sport Education and Society, 1–15.
Zahavi, D. (2014). Self and other: Exploring subjectivity, empathy, and shame. Oxford University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Aggarwal, N., Todariya, S. & Trehan, K. Embodiment and Disorientation: A Phenomenological Analysis of Work from Home During COVID-19. Hum Stud (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-023-09694-2
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-023-09694-2