How can we guarantee that “extracting data” is realised most respectfully and reciprocally online? How can we receive the most relevant responses from the interviewee in online interviews? These questions have been even more pertinent during the Covid-19 pandemic. In this paper, we aim to demonstrate how the preparation of the research process that involves online interviews with highly skilled Italians abroad, functions when a group of social scientists come together, and take decisions on criteria and modality of virtual fieldwork. The intricacies of the online interviews are numerous. Yet, there is a research gap regarding the details of the process of conducting them. We find that the periods before, during and after online interviews indicate a whole learning process, which is neglected in the current literature. Hence, we argue that organisation, use of time, density of the themes, mindfulness, synchronisation and handling of sensitive issues are the main tenets of the art of doing online interviews. In this paper, we explore and explain each aspect, also in a chronological manner, benefiting from the previous literature and contributing to research with our anthropological and sociological insights about using technology whilst conducting online interviews with highly skilled Italians abroad.

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Aujourd’hui, de nombreuses femmes avec un haut niveau de diplômes, et des spécialisations dans des domaines traditionnels ou inédits, se retrouvent à occuper des postes de consultantes, collaboratrices, travailleuses indépendantes : leurs parcours fragmentés sont faits d’allers-retours entre des lieux différents où et depuis lesquels elles travaillent. Dans ce cadre, la maison est l’un des espaces de travail, entre nouvelles opportunités et contradictions anciennes. L’élan vers une organisation autonome et la satisfaction de faire naître de ses propres compétences des idées et projets qui trouvent leur place sur le marché du travail cohabitent avec la nécessité d’un investissement sans limites de temps et d’un engagement personnel sur de nombreux fronts qui n’exclut pas la solitude ni la sensation d’isolement. L’organisation du travail à distance, l’utilisation intensive de moyens technologiques suscitent la sensation de « travailler sans corps ». L’article éclaire les vides et les pleins touchant au thème de la corporéité et souligne les effets de dématérialisation qui se produisent à l’intérieur de l’organisation du travail à distance, surtout lorsqu’il est produit dans l’espace domestique. En termes méthodologiques, l’utilisation d’une approche biographique et narrative a permis de comprendre les vécus des femmes interviewées à partir du sens qu’elles donnent ellesmêmes à leurs propres expériences de travail et à leur place singulière dans l’espace domestique.

The article proposes a reading of the changes that occurred with regard to the use of time, during the experience of confinement, and focuses in particular on the impact of the experience of working from home. The results of a research conducted the period of the pandemic furnish the backdrop of this analysis. The hypothesis is that the practice of working from home, looked at from the perspective of time patterns, has a normalizing effect in terms of the plurality and multiformity of patterns that govern daily life. The time of the everyday – viewed by the sociology of time as a resistant time with respect to the mechanisms that regulate social life – is forced to absorb and catalyse the characteristics of an all-productive time, and to come to terms with the phenomena of acceleration that regulate social life. The Foucauldian category of “ disciplining “ has been used to describe the effects brought about by the use of domestic space upon the perception and quality of temporal patterns.