Three generations of Telework: New ICTs and the (R)evolution from Home Office to Virtual Office

‘New ICTs’, such as smartphones and tablet computers, have revolutionised work and life in the 21st Century. Crucial to this development is the detachment of work from traditional office spaces. Today's office work is often supported by Internet connections, and thus can be done from anywhere at any time. Research on detachment of work from the employer's premises actually dates back to the previous century. In the 1970s and 1980s, Jack Nilles and Allan Toffler predicted that work of the future would be relocated into or nearby employees’ homes with the help of technology, called ‘Telework’. Analysing technological advancements—the enabling forces of change in this context—over four decades sheds new light on this term: they have fostered the evolution of Telework in distinct stages or ‘generations’. Today's various location‐independent, technology‐enabled new ways of working are all part of the same revolution in the inter‐relationship between paid work and personal life.     

Remixing work,family and leisure: teleworkers' experiences of everyday life

This paper explores whether and in what ways telework is associated with a reconfiguration or remixing of daily work, family and leisure activities. Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with 51 teleworkers employed in a financial organisation in Canada. For some, telework was a condition of employment, while others negotiated part‐time telework arrangements with managers. Using interpretive thematic analysis techniques, intersections and inter‐relationships between experiences of work, family and leisure were identified. Three main themes emerged, including the need to not only protect, but also containing work time and space; the significance of family and being available for children; and, the relative devaluation of leisure. Although it was anticipated that differences between involuntary and voluntary teleworkers would be evident, gender and family stage were more influential in structuring daily life. The flexibility of telework was valued, but there was little evidence of a reconfiguration of life spheres except for women with children at home.     

Articulation work from the middle—a study of how technicians mediate users and technology

This article studies the work performed by technicians in a large demonstration project, EcoGrid 2.0, in the Danish island Bornholm. Based on observations of household visits conducted by technicians, we demonstrate how these act as ‘middlemen’, mediating and linking together the smart technology of the demonstration and the involved users. Formally, technicians’ work is to keep users online; however, they also perform a number of invisible tasks to keep users engaged and active. Our ethnographic study shows two broad categories of invisible work: first, technicians continually facilitate the willingness of users, recurrently affirming the social contract between users and demonstration project. Second, technicians facilitate the abilities of users by improvising informal training sessions of how to operate the system. These findings are used to discuss the importance of invisible articulation work of technical service workers in large scale real‐world experiments.     

Disrupted work: home‐based teleworking (HbTW) in the aftermath of a natural disaster

Natural disasters disrupt the nature of work, promoting an urgent review of where work is performed. Home‐based telework (HbTW), a common form of telework, is increasingly promoted as a means to ensure continuity of operations in an emergency situation. While widely advocated, little is known of the challenges and outcomes of HbTW when employed in disaster situations. This article explores the organisational and employee experiences of HbTW in the aftermath of a disaster, drawing on data from over 240 public sector workers and their managers who worked from home following a series of earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand. Findings point to critical factors shaping the experiences and outcomes of HbTW in disaster situations. Significant variation in the experiences and perceptions of HbTW for team leaders highlights their pivotal role and heightened pressures to maintain control in complex disaster situations.     

New new technologies: the future and the present of work in information and communication technology

This paper outlines a selection of technological and organisational developments in the information and communication technology (ICT) sector and analyses their likely challenges for workers and trade unions around the globe. It addresses the convergence of telecommunications and information technology, the related developments of ubiquitous computing, ‘clouds’ and ‘big data’, and the possibilities of crowdsourcing and relates these technologies to the last decades' patterns of value chain restructuring. The paper is based on desk research of European and international sources, on sector analyses and technology forecasts by, for instance, the European Union and Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development, and some national actors. These prognoses are analysed through the lens of recent research into ICT working environments and ICT value chains, identifying upcoming and ongoing challenges for both workers and unions, and outlining possible research perspectives.     

‘Work always wins’: client colonisation,time management and the anxieties of connected freelancers

This article focuses on ‘connected freelancers’ as a category of teleworkers and examines the pressures placed on their work‐home balance by their relationship with clients. Based on diaries, questionnaires and interviews, it reveals that, while connected freelancers do not generally work excessively long hours, they do work irregular hours. This is because ‘work always wins’ in a conflict with domestic commitments, a phenomenon the article dubs ‘client colonisation’. Client colonisation was a source of anxiety for respondents, who found themselves continually thinking about the current and future projects on which their livelihoods depend. The article illustrates the porous ways in which they interleave work with non‐work activities and contrasts traditional ‘monochronic’ forms of work with emerging ‘polychronic’ forms, which erode work‐home boundaries. It concludes that a new model of work—one in which individual patterns of control over work‐home balance are paramount—already coexists alongside traditional models but is still insufficiently socially understood and accepted.     

Managerial control and the limits to employee participation in retail work spaces: evidence from a UK IKEA store

This article contributes to labour process debates around managerial control and worker autonomy in the retail workplace. Through critical analysis of managerial strategies in the production of organisational space within an IKEA store, it explores how spatial design and practice shape managerial control and employee participation. Rather than the rhetoric of employee participation espoused by IKEA, our findings emphasise how managers use space to foster employee commitment to corporate objectives. While employees do exercise their own agency and spatial practice, their actions are moulded and constrained by dominant organisational structures and managerial strategies. As such, the article augments existing labour process research by developing new insights about how the spatial dimension shapes managerial control in retail workplaces. Although workers are far from the passive recipients of management decisions apparent in much labour process theory, their participation largely serves the strategic visions and spatial plans of their employer.     

Flexible work designs and employee well‐being: examining the effects of resources and demands

Advances in communication technology continue to expand the possibilities for redesigning work environments to allow for temporal and spatial flexibility. Although flexible work designs (FWDs) are typically launched with high expectations, recent research shows that FWDs also pose challenges to employees and can even impede employee well‐being. Based on the Job Demands–Resources model, we argue that FWDs offer both advantages (FWD‐related resources) and challenges (FWD‐related demands) to employee well‐being. The results (n = 999) show that FWDs are related to employee well‐being through several positive and one negative pathways. FWDs are positively associated with employee well‐being through enhanced work/life balance, autonomy, and effective communication and negatively associated with employee well‐being through increased interruptions. Thus, we introduce a framework that reveals the underlying positive and negative mechanisms in the relationship between FWDs and employee well‐being.     

‘You monitor performance at every hour’: labour and the management of performance in the supermarket supply chain

With reference to the performance management research agenda, this article focuses on the politics of production in food manufacturing and distribution companies in the supermarket supply chain. Burawoy's concept of ‘factory regimes’ is utilised to explore the broader context of labour process change in inter‐linked organisations in the retail supply chain. The article examines the extent to which new despotic or coercive regime characteristics are emerging that weakens the power of both suppliers and labour. In revealing changes in the nature and dynamics of performance regimes within these organisations, the article exposes the connections and linkages between workplaces as distinct moments in the integrated circuit of capital.     

Identifying liabilities of foreignness and strategies to minimize their effects: the case of labor lawsuit judgments in the United States

Most foreign direct investment (FDI) theories assume that foreign subsidiaries are at a disadvantage relative to domestic firms; that is, they suffer a liability of foreignness. Following this reasoning, most FDI research has focused on advantages foreign investors must possess to overcome whatever disadvantages they face. Research directly investigating the sources of foreign subsidiary disadvantages has been notably lacking, despite the fact that understanding disadvantages could uncover ways to reduce exposure to these liabilities of foreignness and improve management of FDI. This study focuses on whether labor lawsuit judgments represent a liability for foreign subsidiaries operating in the United States (U.S.). Specifically, I tested whether 486 British, German, and Japanese subsidiaries operating in the U.S. had more labor lawsuits brought to judgment than a matched sample of U.S.‐owned firms. Results indicate that foreign subsidiaries faced significantly more labor lawsuit judgments in both federal and state jurisdictions. I also investigated several variables hypothesized to be associated with a reduction in labor lawsuit judgments facing foreign subsidiaries. Foreign subsidiaries who used American top officers or whose parent firms had more U.S. operations faced fewer lawsuits, while foreign subsidiaries using human resource professionals actually faced more labor lawsuit judgments. Implications of these findings and avenues for future research are discussed. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.