Making, breaking, and remaking the collective: practices and dynamics of work from anywhere and hybrid working

This paper investigates how corporate nomads experience faire corps, a negotiated organizational embodiment in the context of location-independent work. Based on a multi-sited ethnography combining remote and in situ shadowing, informal conversations, and interviews with mobile employees across sectors, the study explores how individuals make, unmake, and remake the organizational body through affective, material, and relational practices. Anchored in an embodied practice perspective and communication-centered approaches to organizing, the analysis introduces the notion of degrees of embodiment to capture the varying ways in which workers align with, distance themselves from, or reconfigure their relationship to organizational forms. By showing that what matters is not hybridity per se, but the embodied and affective resonance with modes of working, this study challenges dominant narratives that portray flexible work as the "best of both worlds." It contributes to research on new ways of working by foregrounding the invisible, embodied labor involved in sustaining organizational belonging at a distance.