The Management of Distance in Remote-Work Environments: A Deleuzian Approach

The rising incidence of remote work practices over the last decades has introduced radical changes in organizational practices for managing people. Such environments indeed often lead to challenges that are difficult for both employees and managers to overcome. These difficulties are mostly linked to the management of distance, particularly prominent in remote work – physical, temporal, or cultural distances especially. Although several organizational theories have been used to suggest solutions to these specific issues, little attention has been paid so far to philosophical literature; in this research, we use the work of French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, to develop a meaningful framework to analyze the management of distance in remote work contexts. This allows us to reconsider and question traditional theories with regard to remote work and global distributed teams, by stressing out manifestations that are significant of the emergence of these specific environments such as the cultural deterritorialization or the formation of more subtle but powerful modalities of control.