Remote work and reorganization of household infrastructure in the Global South: insights from the Indian information technology industry

Abstract Remote work scholarship treats work-from-home as individual adaptation, ignoring how households must reorganize to enable it. This individualistic bias proves particularly problematic for understanding Global South experiences where infrastructure deficits amplify household burdens. Examining 51 Indian IT professionals’ transition to remote work, we reveal how households reorganized across spatial, temporal, technical, surveillance, and emotional dimensions. We theorize “household infrastructure reorganization” as collective household labor enabling remote work, “domestication of organizational infrastructure” as cost transfer from organizations to households, and “infrastructural volatility” as chronic uncertainty shaping remote work. These findings challenge remote work scholarship and reveal geographic inequalities in remote work.