Organising domestic spaces of professionalisation: selective agency and labour precarity in esports

Drawing on semi-structured interviews and participant-led photography, this study investigates the labour precarity of esports athletes in processes of professionalisation, adopting a sociomaterial framework attentive to domestic spatial arrangements. In line with interest in homeworking within organisation studies, this research treats domestic space to access the micro-level conditions through which digitally mediated activities are rendered recognisable, or not, as work. Considering esports as an aspirational and precarious form of digital labour, this study explores how domestic spaces shape athletes’ relations with professionalisation, and how rooms, desks, devices, furniture, visual backgrounds and household relations help make gaming materially legible as leisure, aspiration, training or labour. Through this analysis, the study contributes to debates on domestic workspaces and digital labour precarity by proposing selective agency, a concept that helps explain how some material elements of domestic workspaces become visible as professional infrastructure, while others remain coded as private, domestic or unsupported.