Teleworking and rural development after the pandemic

The project’s goal is to investigate the potential of teleworking for rural development in post-pandemic Sweden.

The aims of the project are to study the opportunities and obstacles for teleworking, to study the conditions under which it might contribute to rural development, and to study policies for using teleworking as a tool for rural development.The project is based on the assumption that ICT development increasingly is enabling a process of “hybrid urbanization”, viz. online urbanization through ICT networks, where individuals perform part time of their work by teleworking (from home or from coworking spaces).

During this part of working time, they work online, and during the other part they work at the city office “as usual”. During their leisure, they are part of the “air” of the local social life.

The teleworkers are “double embedded” in two different environments, both their professional urban, social environment and their local, rural social environment.

If these double embeddedness conditions are fulfilled, the actors might function as agents of spread of knowledge and information, and possible also as drivers of new initiatives, which would facilitate local innovation and entrepreneurship.With the help of register data, surveys and interviews, the project investigates the conditions under which teleworking might contribute to rural development and which policies, as local as well as regional and national levels, that create the best conditions for this.