Back to the Office, or not? Learning Lessons from Amazon vs. Spotify

As we are slowly recovering from the COVID-19 crisis and the impact it has had on work and society, organizations are more and more questioning their remote and hybrid work models and are tempted to go back to a more “traditional” approach of working from the office. These initiatives are often referred to as the “return to office” (RTO) movement and have gained popularity and traction among many organizations. At the same time, many organizations have developed hybrid knowledge work models or even “work from anywhere” (WFA) approaches that emphasize location flexibility to their knowledge workers. Both discourses currently co-exist and compete in a discursive arena, that of the discourses that surround the future of work. The process of discursive institutionalization has received a broad interest since the seminal work of Phillips et al. (2004). Research has also emphasized the relationship between this legitimacy and discursive institutionalization (Golant & Sillince, 2007), suggesting that discursive legitimation (Vaara et al., 2024) can be key in a process of institutionalization. In this work, we focus on remote knowledge work and on how two major actors (Amazon and Spotify) have adopted very different practices on the topic of workplace location, with Amazon urging its employees to be back in the office full time and Spotify promoting a full remote or hybrid model of knowledge work. More specifically, we analyze how competing discourses about workplace location co-exist in a discursive arena and how both discourses are competing in a discursive legitimation process. To do so, we rely on official communication from both organizations focusing on official blog posts, reports, as well as media interventions from executives. We then conduct a critical discursive analysis focusing on storytelling that is used to support both RTO and WFA discourses. Findings highlight that Amazon and Spotify’s stories about workplace location share some similarities and differences in how they are built and the opposing ideologies that support these discourses. This work contributes to research on discursive legitimation and knowledge management theory by highlighting that Amazon and Spotify’s discourses about knowledge work and workplace location share some insightful similarities and differences as well as how competing discourses evolve within a discursive arena and how these institutionally innovating (or de-institutionalizing) discourses are competing in the same field.