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1. Introduction
Presently, little is yet understood about the workers' experiences who had to promptly convert from working in their usual workplaces to working from home in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. It is too soon to source evidence from literature about studies that have investigated how the Covid-19 pandemic has changed the work setting by gathering insights from workers who instantly became remote workers from their homes. Also, the researchers could not identify a study that intended adopting the structuration theory to research that is investigating the effect of Covid-19 on the work landscape. Therefore, this article attempts to contribute to the emerging literature on the structuration theory and around remote working during the Covid-19 pandemic.
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), Covid-19 was given the interim acronym 2019-nCOV, given that coronavirus is the name for a family of similar viruses. It is mostly explained in the health sector literature that Covid-19 is a disease that is caused by a new strain of coronavirus that was first identified in China towards the end of 2019 (WHO, 2020). As was the case with the entire world, South Africa also succumbed to the Covid-19 pandemic that came with severe restrictions on movement and activity to ease the widespread increase and spread of the virus. Carroll and Conboy (2020) claim that Covid-19 is the most defining crisis the world has witnessed in the past 50 years, although one may generally argue that the pandemic is the most defining crisis the universe has witnessed since the Second World War (1939–1945) about 75 years ago.
The Covid-19 pandemic has affected all entities and levels in society – from individuals to organisational operations. Covid-19 has had a drastic and sudden impact on the practices of both workplaces and within organisations (Carroll and Conboy, 2020). Covid-19 forced, if not all, then most workers globally to adjust their work patterns (Davison, 2020; Richter, 2020). It has now become public knowledge that all spheres of businesses have been affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. From a business context, employers had to find new ways to ensure productivity from workers working remotely from their homes. As a result, the flexibility of working from home became a new way of operating for many workers. It...