Where Home is the Office: The New form of Flexible Work

Internet and local computer based technologies not only change work and home life, but also challenge the relation between them. Drawing on advances in technology, many hi-tech firms promote remote forms of work. Teleworkers give up their company office some or all of the time, and work from home. By separating the place of employment from the place where the work is actually carried out, teleworking restructures the relationship between public and private spheres. Organizations expect to profit from the deep-seated restructuring and decentralization that telework entails. While firms may start teleworking with their budget in mind, however, employees adopt telework to balance their work and family commitments. Indeed, since promoters of telework use different symbols for different groups, goals often come into conflict (Sturesson,1997). The integration of family and work spheres raises deeper issues than moving data from the center to the periphery, and propels us to understand how employees experience working at home for the firm. My discussion looks at how, in the midto late-‘90s, the sales force for the Small Business Market, a subset of a telecommunications firm’s teleworking employees, transfer their office to their homes,. Using qualitative methods, I join those that take the employees’ standpoint (Gerstein, 2001; Mirchandani, 1997; Nippert-Eng, 1996). In the pages that follow, I first examine issues raised in the literature, and define telework. Next, I briefly review the background of the firm and the characteristics of our respondents, then turn to the views of those that I studied that engage in this new form of labor. I describe how employees and their families contribute to the company as they develop ways to manage their home work space and time with the family.