Home-Work Dynamics in the Margins of the Global South

Abstract

Despite growing research on home-work interaction, which offers valuable insights into how boundaries between home and work are affected and managed, much of this work remains largely rooted in white collar, stable, urban, and Global North contexts. This epistemic exclusion has led to a narrow theoretical understanding of home–work dynamics, which overlooks the complex and precarious realities of marginalised groups in the Global South, such as migrants and those living on temporary work sites. My three-paper thesis, comprising a review paper and two empirical papers, seeks to address these concerns.

The first paper, a critical review, challenges the epistemic assumptions underlying existing research on home–work dynamics (i.e. narrow empirical scope, elite and segmented spatio-temporal framings, and the individualized, apolitical treatment of relationality) and offers alternative conceptual pathways from the Global South perspective (i.e. epistemic plurality, marginal and ambiguous spatio-temporality, and dynamic, situated relationality). The following two papers draw on ethnographic fieldwork, including observations, conversations, and interviews with migrant construction workers living on construction sites, as well as builders and labour contractors in Bengaluru, India. The second paper examines how temporary worksites shape the homemaking experiences of migrant families living on construction sites. For these families, homemaking is an ongoing process of finding, constructing, securing, and unmaking, as they negotiate relationships with employers, co-workers’ families, and local communities. The third paper explores how labour regimes operate when young migrant men live on construction sites. The findings show that mechanisms of labour mobilisation and control are deeply connected to workers’ life circumstances and the gendered urban aspirations formed in their patriarchal homes and villages. Labour contractors exploit these dynamics by leveraging young men’s gendered privileges, transferring domestic patriarchal logics to the workplace, and using patriarchal networks as tools of control.

Together, the thesis provides new theoretical and empirical insights that suggest the need to rethink home–work dynamics as relationally, spatially, and materially negotiated, embedded in contexts of unequal social relations. It challenges dominant assumptions in management research that treat home and work as separate, stable, apolitical and individualised domains. More broadly, it contributes to the ongoing effort to build more inclusive and context-sensitive scholarship through exploring home–work dynamics in the margins of the Global South.

Date of Award	14 Jan 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	School of Management
Supervisor	Vivek Soundararajan (Supervisor), Pankhuri Agarwal (Supervisor) & Andrew Crane (Supervisor)