Discursive Construction of Pandemic-Induced Teleworking Implementation: Analysis of Media Discourse

The way media portrays an issue through its use of language influences people’s interpretations of the issue. Despite pandemic-induced teleworking having received considerable media coverage, scholarly work on the media discourses surrounding this phenomenon is rare. This study used thematic discourse analysis method to identify recurrent themes of teleworking in media stories and explore how these themes were discursively constructed. From a corpus of 54 stories from selected East African newspapers, three key narratives were distilled: redefined productivity, work-life imbalance and digital readiness. Results showed that these narratives created a contested discourse on the merits and demerits of teleworking. While the dominant discourses mobilized the gain-frame to depict teleworking as the cost-effective lifeline and future of work, counter-narratives underscored teleworking’s consequences in alienating workers from themselves and the workplace, entrenching work-life imbalance and perpetuating employer-employee tensions on performance expectations. The study enriches scholarly debates on teleworking as the future of work by demonstrating how this phenomenon was discursively constructed by media through different players in the East Africa region and how such discourses inform effective implementation of teleworking into the future of work.