Abstract
Hybrid work is commonly framed as a flexible configuration of time, space, and modality, largely treated as a managerial coordination challenge under conditions of infrastructural stability. This assumption obscures a critical organizing condition in many contexts: infrastructural volatility. Drawing on 20 in-depth interviews with employees and leaders engaged in hybrid work in Pakistan, this study examines how routine stability is achieved amid fluctuating electricity supply, unstable broadband connectivity, and seasonal disruption. Building on routine dynamics and temporal organizing research, the study introduces the concept of infrastructural rhythms to capture how patterned cycles of material instability shape everyday work. The findings identify four mechanisms through which stability is co-produced across organizational levels: temporal realignment with infrastructural calm zones, modal and structural redundancy, distributed stabilization across nodes of connectivity, and anticipatory cognitive and governance practices. Rather than emerging from repetition alone or from managerial boundary control, routine stability is shown to be a rhythmic accomplishment continuously realigned with infrastructural conditions. By foregrounding non-human temporal forces, this study extends hybrid work scholarship beyond flexibility narratives, contributes to sociomaterial research by conceptualizing volatility as a temporal force, and advances routine dynamics theory by positioning infrastructural temporality as constitutive of stability. Hybrid organizing in volatile contexts is therefore best understood not as boundary management, but as rhythm governance.