Workations : Recomposing time and space in the digital era – TRAvail-vaCANCES

Workations represent a new way of conducting professional activities remotely in locations traditionally dedicated to vacations. This emerging form of work has experienced significant growth since the health crisis, driven by the widespread adoption of remote work in many industries. Although tourist areas have long attracted populations who oscillate between making them their primary or secondary residences, those professional and recreational practices today appear to be a source of social and spatial innovation. Thus, workations encompass three dimensions: professional activity, personal life, and leisure and/or tourism practices. International in scope, this research offers a holistic and multidisciplinary analysis of this new practice from three perspectives: the individuals involved, the locations used, and the chosen territories. Combining multiple methodological tools such as territorial monographs, surveys of workation stakeholders, and online documentary analyses will achieve two main objectives: 1) To characterize workation practices in France and abroad, and 2) To identify the implications for the territories and understand the local dynamics generated by workation mobilities through the lenses of tourism, institutional, social, and legal frameworks. Achieving these two objectives and conducting the corresponding analyses should lead to a prospective approach: will this phenomenon remain marginal, or will it tend to expand? Could it give rise to new ways of living, working, and even inhabiting? Will we witness the emergence of new forms of inequalities, both among individuals and across territories? We will thus test the main research hypothesis that workations represent an emerging and evolving model of societal and territorial organization, at a time when both the relationship to work and traditional tourism models are being challenged.