Homely Orderings in Times of Stay-At-Home Measures

Abstract The stay-at-home measures imposed by governments to counteract the COVID-19 pandemic have drawn attention to the domestic sphere. Besides spending much more time at home in general, people also required the private sphere to fulfill multiple functions, including as workplaces, schools, and fitness centers. Within a qualitative social research framework, the paper examines how people in Vienna, Austria re-ordered their homes during lockdowns to address these challenges. We discuss ordering work as a form of care work regarding the home’s conception, realization and maintenance, and understand the home as being produced in and through practices, including ordering practices. In particular, we are interested in whether and how ordering practices gained higher significance during the pandemic, and in how—by reordering their homes—people re-negotiated their social relations and the inequalities connected to care work and the home.


INTRODUCTION
The limited mobility during the COVID-19 pandemic created by lockdowns, quarantines, home office, "short-time work" (in German: Kurzarbeit), 1 and unemployment drew increased attention to the private sphere. In Austria, about half of the first twelve months of the pandemic, which began in March 2020, was characterized by some kind of stay-at-home measure (see Figure 1). During the first lockdown, people were only allowed to leave their homes to care for persons needing assistance, to meet basic needs, or to fulfill professional obligations. Later, physical and mental recreation was added as a legitimate reason to go outside, as was meeting with a limited number of close relatives or friends. The authorities imposed strictly controlled isolation orders when COVID-19 infections or contact with infected persons occurred, especially at the pandemic's onset.
Similar practices of locating individuals have played an important role in public health measures during other epidemics in history, such as the plague in the 17th century, and have been discussed in the context of the disciplinary society by Michel Foucault (1977, 2007. The household became the key unit for this "distribution of individuals in space" (Foucault, 1977: 141), which is based upon the "principle of elementary location or partitioning" (Foucault, 1977: 142, original emphasis). However, the household's role in social history is also central to understanding the transformations of social relations that accompany pandemic-associated changes. As many scholars have shown, the normative model of the nuclear family as the dominant household unit dates back to the emergence of the urban bourgeoisie in the 19th century before expanding into other parts of society. The private and public spheres were established as distinctive spaces: The home became viewed as the sphere of women and unpaid reproductive work, while paid work became attributed to the public sphere outside the home and

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was ascribed to men (Löfgren 1990;Weintraub 1997;Häußermann and Siebel 2000). Since the 1970s, this distribution has received increasing criticism over its inherent gender inequalities, which is reflected in a shift in work-family policies; for example, extending state-supported childcare helped integrate women into the sphere of paid work (Grunow, Begall, and Buchler 2018). In the context of this spatial constellation, looking at how the pandemic has changed the role of the home seems highly relevant for understanding its social effects.
Stay-at-home measures significantly decreased personal mobility in spring 2020 (Frey et al. 2020; Invenium Data Insights GmbH 2020), people spent more times indoors and their homes had to cover multiple functions, including, for example, workplaces, schools, and fitness centers. Against this backdrop, this paper examines how people re-ordered their homes to manage the challenge of the dissolution of established arrangements, for example, regarding ways of living together, the spatial division of living space, and the provision and distribution of care work, and to understand how this affected social relations, especially regarding class and gender.
While many studies address the overall distribution of care work during the COVID-19 pandemic (Bowlby and Jupp 2021;Power 2020;Czymara, Langenkamp, and Cano 2021;Kabeer, Razavi, and van der Meulen Rodgers 2021;Yavorsky, Qian, and Sargent 2021;Zartler et al. 2021), the present paper scrutinizes ordering work as a specific form of care work that concerns the conception, realization, and maintenance of order of the home. We adopt a practice-based research strategy rooted in qualitative social research to understand how, by reordering their homes, people re-negotiated their social relations and the inequalities connected to care work and the home, and thus discuss ordering practices as "pandemic practices" (Werron and Ringel 2020). In doing so, we draw from and contribute to three different fields of research: First, our paper contributes to understanding the social impact of the pandemic and its accompanying measures on care work and the home. Second, our study is linked to research on the home as a locus for the negotiation of social relations and inequalities through everyday practices that, under usual circumstances, are not often consciously thought about. Third, we add to research on care work by investigating the role of the subfield of ordering work.

ORDERING IN TIMES OF STAY-AT-HOME MEASURES
In a paper written shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic's onset, Tobias Werron and Leopold Ringel suggest looking at pandemic practices, meaning "routine activities that are being established, reproduced, HOME CULTURES upended, connected, disconnected, institutionalized, and deinstitutionalized in the course of the pandemic" (Werron and Ringel, 2020: 56, original emphasis), as a "heuristic tool" (Werron and Ringel, 2020: 57) to help understand how the virus assumes social relevance. This perspective views the measures imposed by the government-as well as how they challenged established uses of the home and different ways that homely orderings were realized under these conditions-as a specific, and apparently politically contested, way of enacting the pandemic.
As described earlier, various measures, and especially stay-at-home measures during lockdowns, heavily affected how the home was used, since it had to adopt a wider range of functionalities. Government recommendations or advertisements established new "ideals of home" (Mallett, 2004: 67), and new normative notions of how people should live during the lockdowns. For example, the Austrian government recommended that parents separate their children's learning environments from play areas, provide them with a quiet workplace, and maintain daily routines, such as showering, dressing, and eating breakfast at fixed times (Bundesministerium Bildung, Wissenschaft und Forschung, 2020: 1). Similarly, the Austrian furniture store XXXLutz addressed the home's multiple functions and their implementation during stay-athome measures in an advertisement (see Figure 2). The commercial depicts the fictional XXXLutz family and emphasizes family togetherness but also the demarcation between individual family members as well as between spaces for activities usually pursued outside the home, like cheering on a team in the stadium, visiting a beauty salon, or going to the movies. Likewise, several furniture stores noticed people's need for order during the pandemic and addressed this challenge by promoting ordering systems, as shown in Figure 3. Homely orderings in times of stay-at-home measures may conflict with both existing and these newly established normative notions of home.

HOME CULTURES
Everyday practices within the home like ordering are usually embedded in routines and rarely thought of consciously. When routines no longer work-for example, because of disturbances, inhibitions, and irritations-practices are often reflected upon and must be adapted or changed (Hörning, 2000). The pandemic re-spatialization, i.e., the shift to the domestic sphere, raises the question of how people re-ordered their homes during lockdowns to address these challenges and to which extent the essential role of everyday ordering practices became more explicit while dealing with these transformations and new ideals of the home.

PRACTICES OF ESTABLISHING ORDER IN THE HOME
The sphere of the home is a particularly interesting site for examining pandemic practices, because of how deeply it was affected by many of the transformations that occurred during that time. As many scholars emphasize, the home is not just a building, a place, or a physical unit, but rather a temporary outcome of permanent negotiation processes (Douglas, 1991;Miller, 2001;Binder, 2008;Winther, 2009;McFarlane, 2011;Brun and Fáboss, 2015;Bührig and Kniess, 2016;Boccagni, 2017;Boccagni and Kusenbach, 2020). Considering this processual conceptualization, we are interested in the role of ordering practices in how the home is constituted as a key site for negotiating social norms and hierarchies (Cieraad, 1999;Miller, 2001;Heynen and Gülsum, 2005).
Many scholars have examined the connection between home and order; for example, regarding people's desire to control their life circumstances (Boccagni and Kusenbach, 2020), concerning the home as a territorial system (Märtsin and Nitt, 2005), or by understanding the home as being ordered according to social cosmologies (Bourdieu, Figure 3. An ad from IKEA says "say goodbye to chaos," which is their way of selling organizational systems that address the challenge of eliminating the chaos during times of stay-at-home measures.

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1970). Douglas' (1991, p. 294) elaboration on home being first and foremost an "organization of space over time" is particularly helpful: For example, the home as a storage and service unit in which future needs are anticipated; as a place where space, time, and resources are allocated-and which is ordered itself according to this allocation; through rules that separate bodies and times; as connected to daily routines, fixed times and synchronized activities-but also as control.
In this vein, we conceive ordering practices as practices that revolve around the home's spatial and temporal organization, i.e., the conception, realization, and maintenance of sociomaterial order. This includes, for example, arranging, tidying, and cleaning the living space; creating emotionally comfortable atmospheres and spaces for self-care; determining certain uses for certain rooms; or dividing space among residents. Such a perspective of ordering practices includes a spatial dimension (the arrangement and use of space), a temporal dimension (the planning of daily routines or determining the use of certain places at certain times), and an interactive dimension (order must be negotiated with household members).
As various scholars have argued, order is, however, by no way an objective condition. Rather, notions of order are contingent and historically variable social constructs that are closely linked to social values and (hegemonic) norms of order (Foucault, 1970;Douglas, 1966;Löfgren, 2017). As Ehn, Löfgren, and Wilk (2016, p. 23) show in their ethnographic study of couples moving in together, different notions of order might get into conflict and reveal otherwise unnoticed social differences: "Battles about order in the kitchen drawers, clothes on the floor, and eating preferences give insights into basic cultural ideas and ideals. They also show how conflicts may mirror social differences or how gender conceptions are confirmed or questioned (…)." In another study, Cwerner and Metcalfe (2003, p. 230) contrast the normative discourse around storage and clutter with "diverse moments of tidying, sorting and sorting things" in everyday storage practices and point to the contingency and also to the fluidity of order within the home. Thus, notions and norms of order can manifest in different claims to order, which the home's order can meet to different extents.
However, the establishment of homely order faces multiple constraints, including potential conflicts between co-inhabitants and their competing notions of how the home should be ordered. Likewise, conflicts may arise between the home's inhabitants and how its physical structure regulates social interaction; for example, when the floor plan and infrastructure do not correspond to needs or when furniture and other everyday objects develop their own agency (Birdwell-Pheasant and Lawrence-Zúñiga, 1999;Miller, 2001). Thus, how the home is ordered is often a negotiated compromise between a range of different actors and their ordering efforts.

ORDERING WORK AS CARE WORK
This paper's presentation of ordering practices and ordering work in the home shares many similarities with research from maintenance and repair studies. Scholars in this field have made the essential observation that order and stability are constantly preserved by often-unnoticed practices, meaning that order and stability are always vulnerable and never static (Denis and Pontille, 2015). Several works point out that these maintenance and repair practices can be understood as a form of taking care (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011;Jackson, 2014;Denis and Pontille, 2015;Mattern, 2018;Russel and Vinsel, 2018). For example, Silvis (2022, p. 24) shows that maintaining and caring for objects through repairs in the home links to caring for one's family and other fellow human beings and vice versa. Recognizing ordering work as care work raises questions about the unequal commitment and distribution of homely ordering. As Jackson asked about maintenance work: "Who maintains the infrastructure within which and against which our lives unfold?" (Jackson, 2014: 223). Thus, ordering work as care work is embedded in historical and sociocultural contexts as well as power structures, as reflected in the history of the bourgeois nuclear family and its homely order which resulted in care work being primarily done by women up until now (Madigan, Munro, and Smith, 1990;Bowlby and Jupp, 2021;Power, 2020;Czymara, Langenkamp, and Cano, 2021;Kabeer, Razavi, and van der Meulen Rodgers, 2021;Yavorsky, Qian, and Sargent, 2021;Zartler et al. 2021). Historical and sociocultural contexts as well as power structures also manifest in norms and ideals of living together, common forms of spatial division, notions of what home means and how it should be, but also in unequal opportunities and resources to order and in the distribution of ordering work itself (Märtsin and Nitt, 2005;Boccagni and Kusenbach, 2020). Since home is deeply imbued with social relationships and normative assumptions (Boccagni and Kusenbach, 2020;Winther, 2009), these relationships between residents are negotiated, i.e., stabilized or questioned, through ordering work.

EMPIRICAL APPROACH
This paper's empirical material was collected during Vienna's second and the third lockdown, which occurred between November 2020 and January 2021. Our study examined home transformations and the associated changes to social relations during stay-at-home-measures. We used a qualitative social research framework that particularly focused on everyday social practices (Reckwitz, 2003) as essential sites that reproduce and transform social relations and inequalities of the home. More specifically, we analyzed ordering practices in their spatial, temporal and interactive dimensions.

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Restrictions to face-to-face contact during the COVID-19 lockdowns required us to use online tools to conduct interviews and gain insight into people's living spaces, which resulted in three empirical approaches: First, we relied upon qualitative online interviews to better understand how people discursively negotiated the current situation and differences between the individual lockdowns and how they reflected upon their strategies of re-ordering their homes-especially concerning how they lived together (Howlett, 2022). Second, we asked participants to show us how they dwelled during stay-at-home measures by conducting online video tours through their living spaces with their smartphones. This mobile type of interview helped us access the home as lived (and presented) space, rather than just as narrated space. The materiality of the home and its different "stations" visited during the video tour served as devices to elicit reactions and memories (Kusenbach, 2003;Pink et al., 2020). At the same time, by showing their homes, people enacted the public side of their often-privately perceived living spaces, which was affected by issues of trust and self-presentation. Third, we asked interviewees to keep a video/audio/written diary for collecting situations that could be interpreted as typical of daily lockdown life (Milligan and Bartlett, 2019), which could encompass moments of conflict, but also "tiny" events often left out of conversation. During the interviews, we asked the participants to describe their documentation in more detail.
Our paper is based on a sample of 24 interviewees who were selected according to the principle of contrasting cases (Kelle and Kluge, 2010) to share their experiences about stay-at-home measures with us. More specifically, we used a qualitative sampling scheme that included categories like the participants' economic and cultural capital, their gender and age, the size of their dwellings, and their household constellation, i.e., the social composition of the people living together. We recruited participants by posting a procurement ad in various online groups. A sampling bias towards middle-class households became apparent during the course of our research, which we tried to offset by visiting lower-income Viennese neighborhoods and approaching potential interviewees on the street. Nevertheless, the final sample had a relatively high proportion of middle-class households compared to the population of Vienna. However, we do not consider this to be a problem, since our qualitative sampling strategy does not attempt at representativeness. We used the qualitative data analysis software, MAXQDA, to code and analyze the interviews, online video tours, and video/ audio/written diaries. The cases described in this paper highlight different dynamics of the interplay between ordering practices, social relations and the home.

PANDEMIC PRACTICES OF ORDERING THE HOME
Three sets of practices seemed particularly important to establishing order in the home during stay-at-home measures. The first set consisted of rearranging practices, which established a new spatial order of the home. Second, a set of practices for maintaining the home served as a way to preserve order. The third set comprised practices of creating a place of retreat within the restricted space, which served different purposes of self-care.

REARRANGING THE HOME
Because COVID-19-measures shifted everyday life to the domestic sphere, the home had to meet a range of additional demands. Hence, this section focuses on two ways that rearranging became particularly relevant: First, it was a key strategy for integrating different out-of-home domains into the dwelling; second, rearranging was often directed towards making improvements in the home, which had acquired a more important role under these new circumstances. Our case studies involved interviewees who lived in very different conditions and show that the extent to which they needed to rearrange, as well as their constraints and how they tackled rearranging, were highly contingent on the dimensions of their social positions, including dwelling size, their working conditions, and household constellations.
Paid work was one of the most relevant out-of-home life domains that required finding and creating place during the lockdowns. While the line between work and leisure had previously been drawn clearly for many people through, for example, fixed working hours and workplaces, work during the pandemic had to be embedded into the home. We observed remarkable differences within our sample in how people dealt with this situation: Integrating paid work into the home environment was comparably easy for those who had extra rooms to functionally divide different spaces or had enough space and economic capital to structure and separate space, for instance, with shelves and other items. Under these conditions, rearranging was a clearly delimited task that could be solved with small modifications, as seen with Lukas (37 years), who lives in an 85 m 2 , three-room 2 apartment with his partner and their daughter (1 year). He was able to set up his home office by installing a new shelf in his daughter's room, which she did not use at that time. Because his partner was on maternity leave and did not require a workplace, there was no need for negotiation.
Households that lacked a distinct room or workplace for each person required complex negotiations to establish hierarchies between different tasks. This was a central theme in the interview with Elena (28 years), who works as a management consultant and lives in a 65 m 2 apartment with her partner who works at a tech company. While her partner had already established a workplace in the living room, the couple set up a second desk there for Elena during the stay-at-home HOME CULTURES measures. However, since there was nothing to separate their working spaces from each other, they had to negotiate who could use the living room for important work-related calls.
But what definitely needs a lot of consultation, on a daily basis, is (…) how important are your calls? Are they internal, are they external, are the external ones very important? So, we just had to coordinate every day because we both had a lot of virtual meetings. (…) Because I could actually work quite well from the bedroom, I often went over there and often didn't even ask (…). Maybe it's also because he tended to have more important customers, like international partners (…). And I had more internal arrangements with colleagues. (Elena) As this example shows, besides needing to reorganize the living space, cases where activities could not be simultaneously performed by Elena and her partner in spatial proximity required deciding which activities were considered particularly important and valuable or not. In negotiating who gets the living room for the calls and who has to call from the bedroom, co-inhabitants established hierarchical social values of what and who should be prioritized. Further research could elaborate upon how these negotiations play into a gender hierarchy that reflects the circumstances and hierarchies of paid work.
Fitting all necessary functions into the home was even more challenging for families with school-aged children, since they had to provide a homeschooling environment in addition to one or more workplaces. This was often solved through negotiating the ideals of proper parenting. Some parents tried to provide a stable homeschooling place while carrying out their own work in various places within their dwelling. For example, Beate (41 years), who lives in a 74 m 2 , two-room apartment with her son (7 years) and also worked from home before the pandemic, moved her own workplace to the kitchen table so that her son could use her living room desk where there is a better Wi-Fi connection. Beate is a clear example of a parent who prioritized her child's needs over their own, while also illustrating that limited space often meant the constant renegotiation of specific activity locations that led to improvised solutions.
Besides the coordination of different functions, our interviews showed that rearranging entailed making the apartment more homely or improving the apartment itself. As more time was spent at home, interviewees found it more important to "spruce up," "cozy up," or carry out renovation activities such as painting walls, moving furniture, or other practical, everyday life changes. Rearranging activities included new purchases for home office and homeschooling activities, but also investments into embellishing or rearranging the apartment according to one's own taste, like new furniture or IT equipment. As Beate HOME CULTURES described, "I've become more aware of 'my home is my castle' and it has to be as beautiful as possible. And we've been to IKEA in between [the lockdowns] and bought plants." The newly ignited attention to the importance of "home" and of what it should consist of is also reflected in furniture store profits that, according to an article in the Austrian newspaper Der Standard (2020), were among the COVID-19 pandemic's economic winners. At the same time, not everyone could afford such investments and this dimension of rearranging was therefore marked by social inequalities.
Besides realizing rearrangements meant to improve the home through new purchases, another common practice involved sorting through belongings to make more space to create a new kind of order. For example, interviewees described giving away CDs, outgrown children's clothing, and children's games that were no longer needed. Many interviewees also mentioned that planning how to sort items out and other in-household tasks was a key practice during the lockdowns. On the one hand, this was because they wished to use the extra time spent at home sensibly; on the other hand, it was because "construction sites," i.e., areas perceived as unfinished or unsuitable within the dwelling, became more visible. For example, Beatrice (46 years), who lives in a 68 m 2 , three-room apartment with her husband and two children (6 and 13 years), planned to sew new curtains and sell unused belongings via an online sales platform during the stay-at-home measures. She explained that this was to feel like she had both accomplished something and created more space in-or a change to-the apartment. These planning practices often enabled the interviewees to look ahead, even during the uncertain times of a pandemic, and to bring order and structure into everyday life.
Altogether, the previous functional division of spaces (e.g., the bedroom as a sleeping place; the children's room for playing and as a place of retreat; the dining table for eating) became partly obsolete for many people during stay-at-home measures. Actors were forced to find new, unconventional ways to manage new requirements and limited spatial and infrastructure options. Various official recommendations, such as the aforementioned suggestion to spatially separate functional spheres for school children (Bundesministerium Bildung, Wissenschaft und Forschung, 2020), generated pressure and anger especially among those of our interviewees who could not meet the recommendations for room division. Moreover, living and working conditions, as well as household constellations, influenced the extent of required and desired transformations, while reflecting and producing social inequalities. In particular, interviewees who lived in small apartments reported the constant effort of rearranging and adapting their apartments as a process of trial and error, while this was a less complex task for households with more available space. Again, the means to realize home improvements depended on the household's financial abilities.

MAINTAINING THE HOME
While rearranging concerns the challenge of establishing new spatial uses, maintaining addresses the practices that were required to sustain this new functionality or multifunctionality. Maintaining may include tidying up, tidying away, and cleaning, which refer to practices that bring the dwelling back from a state of disorder to a state of order. This section looks at how well-established maintaining practices were challenged during the pandemic as well as at the strategies that our interviewees adopted to face that challenge and how this is interwoven with issues of social status and gender roles.
First, respondents described a greater need for maintaining during lockdowns because of the increased mess and more dirt created from the constant presence of the dwelling's inhabitants and its permanent use. Many respondents felt that their homes were always messy, and therefore experienced the constant pressure and need to clean and tidy up. One interviewee, Elisa (30 years), who lives in an 86 m 2 , threeroom apartment with her partner, described her feelings: "Yes, I've felt that, since we've been in the lockdown, there's always something to clean and tidy up and much more than I felt before the lockdown, that there's always something to do." Apart from the general increased need for maintenance, the respondents also reported the blurred boundaries of the practice of maintaining. For many, maintaining was no longer restricted to specific times and embedded in clearly defined routines, but became an omnipresent activity that often happened in passing and gave some interviewees the sense of being constantly occupied with tidying up. Carola (33 years), who lives in a 72 m 2 , three-room apartment with her husband and her daughter (10 years) told us: "So because it's clear somehow that you're at home and of course when you're at home you can cook and then you can put things away and do the dishes and wash and what not. You can theoretically do all that in passing." The constant need for maintenance was further enhanced by multifunctional uses of space, along with the overlap of work and leisure time. One of the main challenges was that work could not be done in a single, stable place. Thus, the workplace had to be recreated every day, often even several times a day. Daniel (35 years), who lives in a 79 m 2 , three-room apartment with his partner, for example, shared a desk with her that was used according to the importance of their respective work activities: "If one of us insisted that he or she absolutely needed it, then we agreed that, okay, you would get the desk and monitor today in the morning, and I would get it the day after tomorrow and two days after that, something like that." Moreover, the desk always had to be tidied up for the other person, which meant that documents or materials needed for work always had to be put away and prepared again-either in the same place or at another workplace.

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Repurposing the dining table is another example that illustrates the spatial overlap of activities that our participants frequently experienced. Isabel (30 years) lives with her son (6 years) in an 80 m 2 , fourroom apartment. Figure 4 shows Isabel's dining table. Many objects can be seen on the table, such as breakfast items, her son's school materials, Isabel's work documents and an advent wreath, tools, and handicraft materials. Isabel, who sent us the picture as part of her photo diary, included the comment: " Work table, handicraft table, gaming table, home schooling table." The next picture ( Figure 5) that Isabel sent us depicts the dining table somewhat later when the breakfast and handicraft materials have been put away. The jug and the advent wreath remain on the table, but the son's school materials are in the center. Many households in our sample required the dining table to fulfill multiple functions during lockdowns, so the participants had to clear it several times per day and then prepare it for subsequent activities.
Some interviewees tried to reduce their maintenance needs by rearranging in order to limit functional overlaps. In Sandra's (33 years) case, who lives in an 83 m 2 , four-room apartment with her husband

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and her four children (6, 9, 11, and 12 years), the children slept next to their parents in the same bed during lockdowns because they used their own beds as storage space for school materials.
There were multiple factors that affected the degree to which interviewees were confronted with maintaining during lockdowns. Those who continued to work outside their homes and those who had their children in institutional childcare experienced fewer challenges, while those who had children at home during stay-at-home measures reported more difficult circumstances related to cleaning, tidying up, and creating order. Those who lived in larger apartments had more opportunities to establish distinct places in the home for new activities and thus did not need to constantly tidy up places to prepare them for different uses. By contrast, those who had little space at their disposal had often been experiencing spatial overlaps and related maintenance efforts already before the pandemic. For example, Jane (40 years), who lives with her two children (8 and 10 years) in a 55 m 2 , two-room apartment used to store her mattress under her daughter's bed in the children's room during the day. However, the lockdowns often increased such overlaps to the extent that interviewees recognized that their living conditions did not correspond to a specific ideal of domestic space division. Like other forms of care work, these practices of creating order through spatial and temporal structuring (that are meant to support all household members' well-being) revealed unequal gender relations. For example, female interviewees often reported spending more time tidying up and cleaning than their male cohabitants.

CREATING A PLACE OF RETREAT
The third set of ordering practices, which we describe as creating a place of retreat, helps grasp co-inhabitants' attempts to demarcate space for self-care. Interviewees discussed time dedicated to the self in terms of relaxation and leisure as well as potentially being able to engage in focused, undisturbed work. Creating a place to enable these activities was an essential part of restoring the home despite being restricted alongside co-inhabitants to the dwelling's limited space. The participants used different figures of speech to describe their increased proximity to co-inhabitants or the constraints of their dwelling's materialities fostered a greater potential for conflict. For example, "the apartment was constantly getting smaller" (Sandra); "sitting on top of each other" (Ruth); "pouring five liters into a one-liter bottle" (Beatrice) or "like a prison" (Isabel). Therefore, this section analyzes the different ways that people tried to create places of retreat and the various difficulties that they faced in the process. Their creation involved negotiating the legitimacy of such places, their purposes, the meanings associated with "retreat," and how "retreat" is narrated. Likewise, this section shows how social relations and values are reproduced, fought over, and re-negotiated within this process.
Gender and social relations in general became manifest in conflictual (but also in consensual) negotiations over who gets a place of retreat in the first place and for what purpose, who claims it, and who denies a need for it. This was evident with Valerie (39 years), who lives in a 100 m 2 , four-room apartment with her husband and her two sons (8 and 15 years), and worked full-time and exclusively from home during the stay-at-home measures. Different daily routines-Valerie's husband slept in because of his evening work shifts, while she was responsible for preparing breakfast and getting the kids out of bed-made her perceive a great inequality between their burdens. This was also reflected in how they negotiated the need to establish somewhere to retreat. Valerie's partner said that "he would like to have his own room" where she should not "interfere," which she considered "a very exaggerated and elitist desire" (Valerie). Her own picture of retreat space was one where she could work undisturbed.
Like many of our other interviewees, Valerie faced barriers to realizing her retreat spaces. She sent us a picture of a small alcove where she set up her home office (see Figure 6); however, since the heating did not always work there, she sometimes moved to the kitchen, where her younger son did his homework, because his own room was fully occupied with his drums. Her decision to not interfere with her son's recreational space demonstrates how Valerie balanced normative demands of proper parenting against her own professional duties-which she hardly managed to fulfil. Valerie ultimately described her retreat space as when her son was occupied or distracted from her to the extent that she could concentrate on her work despite her limited space. This also shows Figure 6. Valerie's Diary-Day 1: "My working corner in the cold bedroom-behind the wardrobe. Sometimes a good place to retreat to, but when he (the son) is homeschooling, I will be found here too. ."

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how materiality and infrastructure (e.g., the lack of heating) enable or disable opportunities for creating and using retreat places.
Elias (25 years), whose household constellation includes two other roommates in a 100 m 2 , four-room apartment, also emphasized the challenge of creating a place of retreat. He described the thin walls that separated his private room from the other roommates' and how he was constantly at the mercy of their noises. Therefore, he created a temporary place of retreat by waking up two hours earlier than his roommates.
Besides being a spatial issue, our material illustrates how creating a place of retreat can be influenced by the household constellation and its ability to restrict opportunities of retreat regardless of apartment size. Isabel, a single-mother, described that, although she had 80 m 2 at her disposal, she perceived her apartment as a prison rather than a home. The dining table became the "center" where everything took place and the other rooms, which she referred to as the "periphery," were barely used because her son required her full and constant attention. To her, establishing a place of retreat often meant shifting her son's attention to, for example, the tablet. Especially during her period, this was a strategy to create a place of retreat in order to recover from physical exhaustion. However, the ease Isabel felt after having an hour to herself was associated with doubts over whether it corresponded to her ideals of proper parenting: "But then this feeling always comes up; how much TV is actually Ok?" (Isabel) Altogether, there were great variations in the purposes and meanings of a place of retreat. The examples illustrated by Valerie, Elias, and Isabel all show how creating a place of retreat does not necessarily mean physical distancing, but primarily means regaining control over sensorial influences. For others, like Elena, the idea of retreat was closely linked to having a room for oneself: A place of retreat for each individual who lives in an apartment with others should really be given in the best case. (…) I think it doesn't have to be big, but just a small, closed-off space, just something where you have your four walls, that you can somehow separate from where the others are. Something that is just for yourself. That's just totally important or even more important now [during stay-at-home measures]. (Elena) As this was not given for Elena, she and her partner installed an adjustable bamboo roll to divide the living room. By pulling the bamboo roll up and down, they created a visual barrier that signaled to each other that one did not want to be disturbed (see Figures 7  and 8). Hence, this material arrangement created demarcation by regulating social interaction.
In all cases presented thus far, the place of retreat was narratively framed as something good, necessary and socially desirable. However, a place of retreat or its specific concepts were rejected at other times, which revealed its context-relatedness and its socio-cultural contingency. Freya (36 years), a single mother who lives with her son (3 years) in a 87 m 2 , three-room apartment, works as an optician. During the stay-at-home measures, she worked at the optical store as usual and took up the state's offer of bringing children to its limited kindergarten service. 3 When Freya was asked if creating a place of retreat was a challenge or an issue, she declined and said: No, actually not. (…) For me it was always clear that I have the responsibility for our son and that I am there for him. And I (…) wasn't hysterical or anything else about it, and I neither said I need time for myself now. So, I never had that. That's the way it is. We simply managed everything together. Me and my son. (Freya) Freya's depiction illustrates how she could not relate to this concept of spending dedicated time on herself, neither regarding the time before the pandemic nor during the stay-at-home measures. There are other cases in our sample where a place of retreat was not reported as an issue at all, even when household members lacked their own rooms and had less available space than others. In these cases, the option to work away from home and to use the state's limited childcare services provided external retreat options.
When stay-at-home measures are not in effect, places of retreat are typically embedded in daily routines and constituted through the regular absence and presence of household members. Schools and the social network beyond the core family can play an important role in enabling self-care by taking over other care responsibilities (e.g., schooling, babysitting). Because the COVID-19 pandemic largely cut this network off, creating a place of retreat became explicit and an essential ordering practice during this time.
The pandemic illustrated differences in how importance is allocated to places of retreat: Our research reveals very different meanings of retreat, which are closely linked to self-perceptions and social norms (ranging from a whole room to oneself, to not interacting with other persons, or regaining control over sensorial influences). The necessity and difficulty of establishing a place of retreat depended on the household constellation as well as the dwelling's size and infrastructure, which made social inequalities more relevant. Moreover, the interviews show how the actual negotiation of establishing a place of retreat is closely linked to normative gender role conceptions and ideas of proper parenting. Hence, it seems most challenging for women who consider themselves as being more responsible for care work to find a legitimate retreat strategy.

CONCLUSION
We assume that the high significance of ordering practices during the COVID-19 pandemic revealed by our empirical study arose because measures meant to combat the pandemic transferred many aspects of provisioning and care work to the home, which thereby strengthened HOME CULTURES the equation between housing, the nuclear family, and care. Thus, as our introduction notes, these pandemic measures corresponded to the spatial partitioning into households, as described by Foucault (1977Foucault ( , 2007. Grounding the pandemic measures on the cellular spatial structure of households meant that previously state-provided reproductive work became individualized and moved from the paid economy to the unpaid economy (Kabeer, Razavi, and van der Meulen Rodgers, 2021;Stevano et al., 2021;Yavorsky, Qian, and Sargent, 2021). This occurred, for example, through (partial) childcare and educational institution closures, which involved infrastructure that had previously supported women's working capabilities and gender equality (Yavorsky, Qian, and Sargent, 2021). Thus, as many scholars attest, the COVID-19 pandemic is also a crisis of care (Bowlby and Jupp, 2021;Power, 2020). Besides reproductive work, paid work was also individualized and frequently transferred to the household sphere, leading to manifold home office arrangements. This spatial privatization of reproductive and paid work transformed the home into the central provision unit during the pandemic. Many interviewees described how reductions to an "infrastructure of care" (Alam and Houston, 2020, p. 1) created increased care work, which included ordering work, and also threatened the home as a place for self-care (Bowlby and Jupp, 2021). However, not everybody was affected by these changes in the same way: Those who continued to work outside the home experienced fewer changes to their everyday household routines (they faced other forms of exposure to the pandemic, such as through an increased risk of infection or an increased workload) (e.g., Kalleitner and Partheymüller, 2021). Likewise, households without children did not experience this crisis of care to the same extent (e.g., Langenkamp, Cano, and Czymara, 2021).
Complementing these overall observations, we looked at how the challenges posed by the shifts described above were tackled through the concrete practices of homely orderings. This helped with understanding how the COVID-19 pandemic actually gained social relevance and how it transformed and continues to transform social relations. Following Douglas (1991) definition of home as regularities, orientation, the structure of space and time, and control over space, the ordering practices of rearranging, maintaining, and creating a place of retreat are an attempt to restore and to spatially and emotionally organize home and living together. This occurred in an interplay between the materialities of the home, normative claims, and concrete everyday practices that established particular relations between the household members, and between them and the world; for example, through negotiating the importance of certain activities over others. Altogether, the renegotiation of homely orderings was connected to different forms of inequality that were partly intensified by the measures imposed by the government.
First, we observed an unequal distribution in the potential and ability to adapt homely orderings to the changing necessities that HOME CULTURES arose during the pandemic. On the one hand, different housing conditions and quality (for findings regarding Austria, see Bacher, 2020;Berghammer, 2020aBerghammer, , 2020bZartler et al., 2021: 32) strongly influenced inhabitants' opportunities to integrate different functionalities. Likewise, household constellation determined the necessity thereof, with households that include child care responsibilities being most affected (Stevano et al., 2021;Jianghong et al., 2022), which also raised challenges for different practices of maintaining as well as creating a place of retreat. Our case studies show that those who had more space experienced fewer challenges concerning rearranging and maintaining compared to people who lived in smaller apartments with fewer rooms. However, although apartment size was an issue for creating a place of retreat, it was not necessarily the most important one, since household constellation, needs, and the expectation of other household members were also decisive. This was illustrated by interviewees with small children and, especially among single mothers, which is in line with the results from other studies (e.g., Chattopadhyay, 2021;Hertz, Mattes, and Shook, 2021). Moreover, we found that habits and expectations became manifest in different ways: in the ideals of improvements within the home; in normative ideas of the demands that should be met through maintaining; and in notions of the importance, the legitimacy, and the meaning of a place to retreat to.
Second, ordering practices became a key means to negotiate gender roles within the home. Many studies have stated that the increased workload of unpaid care work during the COVID-19 pandemic, like physical or educational-but also mental tasks and routine houseworkwere primarily handled by women and that the pandemic reinforced gender inequalities (Bowlby and Jupp, 2021;Power, 2020;Czymara, Langenkamp, and Cano, 2021;Kabeer, Razavi, and van der Meulen Rodgers, 2021;Yavorsky, Qian, and Sargent, 2021;Zartler et al., 2021). While Austria was already characterized by a high inequality in its distribution of care work, this further increased during the pandemic (Berghammer, 2022;Derndorfer et al., 2021;Zartler et al., 2021), a point reflected in our material, for example, in that men generally used separate home offices while women had to work next to their children. A study conducted in Israel drew similar conclusions over how gender roles were crucial to how different spatial entitlements were perceived during stay-at-home measures (Waismel-Manor, Wasserman, and Shamir-Balderman, 2021), while Power (2020, p. 68) similarly assessed the pandemic measures as "gender-regressive." However, other studies found that while the pandemic did not usually lead to an equal distribution of work, it sometimes offered new chances to involve men in childcare and housework, and suggested a more nuanced picture (e.g., Kreyenfeld and Zinn, 2021;Hank and Steinbach, 2021;Buschmeyer, Ahrens, and Zerle-Elsäßer, 2021). While our respondents did not always report gender inequality, several interviewees brought up the theme of negotiating how much of the increased ordering workload must be done by whom. Many women shared that they spent more time tidying and cleaning compared to their male co-inhabitants. Gender relations were also negotiated through how hierarchies were established between different activities while rearranging; for example, when addressing how to organize the household's limited use of home office space. Furthermore, gender-related inequalities manifested in our sample's unequal purposes that justified self-related time-whether it entailed having time for oneself or for being able to work. Although we cannot make any quantitative claims about the COVID-19 pandemic's overall effects on gender relations, our material shows that negotiating gender norms, including parenthood, was a key issue in the home's reorganization during the pandemic, which was therefore reflected on more consciously. While many quantitative studies that measured gender inequality focused on the distribution of time dedicated to paid work, housework, child care and other activities, looking at ordering practices offered a more nuanced picture of how gender was actually negotiated at different levels during the pandemic.
The negotiations described above happened in light of normative claims of good crisis management. This ethical dimension resonates with Lessenich's (2020, p. 179) view of the pandemic's crisis management being structured by a neoliberal-"neosocial logic"-which always involves a specific, individual, ethical demand from the subjects, i.e., "individual responsibility in social responsibility." Many study participants described being confronted by the burdens imposed through public debates and government recommendations concerning, for example, proper housing, or being a good parent or partner. How the home is ordered is, thus, not only an individual decision but should be recognized in relation to the social norms of ordering.
For many people, the COVID-19 pandemic's (and its measures') disruption made their taken-for-granted practices and routinized forms of work-along with those of others-more visible. This concerned multiple areas of work, like the lower service class, unpaid work, as well as paid care work within and beyond the household. It also included ordering work as an essential part of care work, which is usually "practiced through many small everyday acts and interactions" (Bowlby and Jupp, 2021: 425). However, whether these changes will have an impact on a larger social scale and increase the public visibility of care work and related social relations is a question that studies will only reveal in the coming years.

NOTES
1. The Austrian government authorized companies to temporarily reduce regular working hours. In May 2020, 35.2% of all employees were in short-time work (Zartler et al., 2021: 10). 2. In the Austrian context, this usually means that the apartment has a living room, two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a kitchen. Sometimes

HOME CULTURES
one of the three rooms is a large, combined kitchen/living room. In this case, the apartment is still a 3-room apartment. 3. Childcare facilities were generally open for those in need of childcare. However, the definition of need was a complex negotiation on an individual as well as on a collective level, especially regarding families in which parents could work from home. In public and everyday discourse, there was controversy about parents bringing their children to limited childcare facilities. On the one hand, some parents faced accusations of not being able "to make it" at home, putting their children's health at risk and not helping to combat the pandemic. As a result, some parents were reluctant to accept the offer and faced the double burden of working from home while taking care of their children. On the other hand, public figures expressed their sympathy for parents who took advantage of the limited childcare available, albeit in sometimes ambiguous terms, such as those used by Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, who stressed that there was no "shame" in "no longer being able to stand it in your home with your family and taking advantage of daycare for your children." (News, 2020)

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

FUNDING
This work was supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) [grant number ZK60-GZ27].