Remote Work: a Literature Review of a Renewed Work Modality

The pandemic produced the largest global experiment on remote work ever done, showing that it will be one of the new forms of work of our future. For this reason, it is timely to produce today a comprehensive literature review of this topic that provides the ground for the understanding of this paramount experience and to support future adoptions. Starting from a bibliometric database of publications, we analyze the consistency and the evolution of interest over the last 30 years of research across scientific disciplines. We compare the most relevant-both shared and exclusive- keywords, describe the peculiarities 1and the overlaps, and build an argument on the evolutionary dynamics of keywords that go from hot and obsolete or keep a stable centrality over time. Then, we analyze the subset of scholarly production in the area of business and management, only, and report theoretical or empirical works, methods and datasets used, main contributions in terms of main themes addressed. In addition, we do a manual screening of the usage, conceptual overlaps, and peculiarities of the different labels used such as remote work, flexible work, smart work, teleworking, etc. This work fosters to reground our understanding of remote work under a unified framework, in which disciplinary-specific interests are acknowledged, connected and cross-fertilized in an interdisciplinary perspective, as well as, dispersively diverse labels are ordered, accurately distinguished and assessed in terms of overlap, and appropriate focalization for the contemporary situation.