REVIEW ARTICLE BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME Peter Whalley Managing Teleworkers and Telecommuting Strategies Gina Vega Westport, Conn: Praeger, 2003 Not so long ago I interviewed a computer engineer in her home. Surrounded with toys and a napping baby—the interview time had been chosen carefully—she talked about how she worked as an independent contractor for a large electronics company. Connected by high-speed broadband, two telephone lines, and a cell phone, she felt fully integrated into the work, exchanging electronic files with her colleagues and having telephone conversations with customers two continents and umpteen time zones away. She told me she often worked late after the baby was in bed and during the baby's afternoon nap before she went to pick her older child up from school. Despite these odd working times, however, she was convinced that none ofthe company's customers and only some of her work colleagues knew that she worked at home. She was very contented with the arrangement. This is not, however, the way most Americans work. The same woman gave a graphic description of her life after the birth of her eldest child when for the first three years she had worked full-time, in-house, for the company that now hired her as an independent contractor. "Up at six, prepared breakfast, got him [the son] up, washed, dressed. Piled him into the second car [spouse had left earlier in the other car]. Navigated the back roads to get him to daycare by seven-thirty. Joined the highway with a hundred others. Sat in traffic jam for an hour. Got to work. Drove around to find a parking space. Got to the cubicle. Put in a ten-hour day. Put the whole thing into reverse. Picked up dinner. Ate. Put the baby to bed. Collapsed in © 2007. Business Ethics Quarterly, Volume 17, Issue 1. ISSN 1052-150X. pp. 163-172 BUSINESS ETHICS QUARTERLY front of the TV. Repeat. My husband did the same, except he picked up the baby in the evening. Not fun." Even giving the description she sounded tense. As the increasing number of stories of stressed-out famihes testifies, it is this latter arrangement which more typically represents the way we now live. The landscape of work for the past two centuries has largely been one of a rigid separation of home and the workplace. When we think of work, we think of factories, skyscrapers, or corporate office parks. Home, for most Americans, is a single family home with a two-car garage in a suburban landscape, safe for children, the world of work successfully banished. Although the spatial distance which Americans have put between work and home has greatly increased since the days of steel mills and gritty industrial housing, this separation of work from home, and work from family, is one of the founding social transformations of industrial society itself. Working at home carries with it the aura of another time, when craftsmen worked over the shop and the family shared in the farm's daily labors. For the most part, Americans have been content with the bargain. But increasingly we grudgingly recognize the costs we pay for this separation: traffic jams, long commutes, high energy use, and long effective work days, for example. Sitting in a traffic jam after dropping the kids off at day-care, even the most committed and successful employee must question whether it's all worth it. A spatial division of labor which made some sense when it was accompanied by a gendered one—dad at the factory or office, mom taking care of the kids—is increasingly dysfunctional when both mom and dad have to deal with the daily commute and the school run. Of course we wouldn't be Americans if we did not think we could come up with a technological fix for such problems. And, indeed, since the nineteen seventies a very different image of work has periodically been proposed. "Telework" and "telecommuting" are simply two of the more popular terms for the idea that a new age of digital technology is going to free workers from these constraints of time and space. With cellular phones, personal computers and broadband, communication between employer and employee, between groups of workers, and between employee and clients is instantly and continuously possible. As the computer engineer—one of many my colleague and I interviewed while researching fiexible work arrangements'— pointed out: Why go to an office when you can access the same files over the wire? Why be tied to an office phone if the same conversation can be had from the comforts of home? It is a tempting proposal. With telework the necessity to go back and forth between home and work disappears, creating more free time and less environmental damage. Workers can, in principle, live where they want, in the city or the country, by the mountains or the shore, and still be able to do their work. They can look after children, be home for the plumber, and deal with emergencies. For employers, telework offers similar opportunities: flexibility of location, reduced space costs, flexibility of deployment in case of bad weather or other emergencies, and even, because of its attractions to employees, reduced recruitment and retention costs. REVIEW ARTICLE 165 So tempting a proposal, in fact, that one can only wonder why it has not spread more rapidly. Gina Vega wonders too. Her Managing Teleworkers and Telecommuting Strategies comprehensively reviews the possibilities of telework and offers tips and strategies for companies wanting to adopt the new technology. In just over two hundred pages she manages to cover the history of work and communications technology; identify a list of stakeholders that includes employers, workers, equipment suppliers, telephone companies, consultant researchers, and public agencies; discuss the strengths and weaknesses of electronic communication; elaborate on the sources of resistance to its implementation by both managers and workers; review telework's world-wide spread; and even manages a too brief report on research that she and her students conducted of afirm that has successfully implemented a telework strategy. All of this is then folded into a guide for managers of the new technology. Unfortunately, the result is a whole that is much less satisfactory than many of its excellent parts. Much of the difficulty stems from the contradiction between Vega's enthusiasm for telework's growing importance and her recognition that employers have been very reluctant to implement it. Even the Federal government, which has periodically shown enthusiasm for telework, in part because of its promise to cut energy use and pollution, has had difficulty following through. It made plans in 1996, for example, to have 60,000 of its employers working at home by 1998, but it managed much less than half that. For Vega, this question of why employers have been so reluctant to implement telework is at least as important as the problem of how to manage it. Unfortunately she is better at answering the second question than thefirst, and her struggle to answer both only adds to the book's confusion of purpose and style. Nonetheless Vega is right to take telework seriously. Even if its numbers never reach the targets sometimes set for it, and even if, as I shall argue, the benefits it offers are likely to be unevenly spread and sometimes be mixed, telework forces us to rethink our taken-for-granted assumptions about the conventional boundaries between work and home. Vega's mix of encyclopaedic information and handbook practicalities make this a difficult book to review, so rather than try to follow the author through the vagaries of her chapter organization it is best to begin with the issue to which Vega keeps returning and which I think is the most illuminating one: Why, despite all the hype, has telework been so slow to take off? For some employers, of course, telework is simply impractical. There may be shared equipment such as a classroom or machinery that needs multiple users to make it efficient. Or employees may need to interact directly with customers face- to-face. In some instances, questions of legal liability and safety regulations remain BUSINESS ETHICS QUARTERLY unresolved. Not all work can be safely and efficiently done at home even with all the wonders of modem technology. Nonetheless much of modem work is primarily about the transfer and processing of information and, on the face it, this offers many opportunities for dispersing the workforce to their homes if they can be kept connected electronically. But the very nature of telecommunication can sometimes be disconcerting and difficult. Vega, for example, explores the problems that arise when employees (and their managers) rely on the single-stranded connectedness of electronic communication, whether by telephone or e-mail. Such communication can be problematic when it is divorced from the other information that usually accompanies face-to-face interaction: body language, facial expressions and nuanced voice tones. Its lack of social embeddedness can lead to such dysfunctional communication forms as "flaming" [sending inflammatory messages via e-mail], as the social norms surrounding normal conversation are stripped away. Even its very efficiency can lead to unanticipated problems. Electronic communication tends to focus on a single topic and discourages the social "chat" often mixed-in with instrumental communication done face-to-face. It can lead to a sense of disconnectedness, particularly when there is no other communal activity to give it context. Telework can also cause some employees, and even their managers, to worry that working at home may put them "out of sight and out of mind." They feel they need to actively practice keeping their name in front of their boss simply to get recognition for work that might otherwise be done invisibly and they worry they may be overlooked for promotions that go to those who are more visible in the company. While some employees, especially those with identifiable sets of expertise, do not mind this active self-promotion, those whose careers rely on impressing their manager with reliability and competence may find it harder to demonstrate their virtues. Such concems are important, and may indeed give companies pause before jumping in, but they are hardly critical and Vega is very good at offering suggestions for overcoming them. Though, like most business guides, they risk sounding facile when reduced to a list, her recommendations to management are practical and reasonable: become expert in the new tools of communication so as to avoid sending the wrong messages; bring people together for social events; stress the larger purpose of the company; don't tighten the electronic leash too much; ensure that employee's know their careers will be taken care of; remind employees that they are valued as much off-site as on; and most of all, create an atmosphere of trust. This is all good stuff and companies that have implemented successful telework strategies probably have managers that do all of these. Unfortunately if it were all as simple as following Vega's advice we might have expected more companies to take advantage ofthe new technology. We need to dig deeper for the source of resistance. In fact the core of the problem is quite simple. Companies don't really trust employees to work out of their sight. Indeed, the conventional wisdom of most REVIEW ARTICLE twentieth-century social theorists is that the growth of the modem organization is in large part to allow companies to directly control the when, how, and where their employees work. The problem, in part, lies in the very nature of the market for labor. As in all market relationships, the aim of the seller (in this case the potential employee) is to sell as little labor as possible for as much money as possible, for the buyer (the potential employer) the aim is to strike the opposite bargain. But the market for labor is different from the market for products; what is bought by the employment contract is labor time but what the employer wants is actual work. Hence the central problem of tmst and control that has generated such a vast sociological and economic literature: just how does the employer gets his or her money's worth? The solutions developed over two hundred years of industrialism are now the conventional wisdom. For most low-skilled, routine work control usually involves some combination of direct supervision, monitoring by machine, or the close checking of output. For more discretionary highly-skilled jobs procedures are more subtle: hire people with the "right" attitude, promise them promotion for achieving good results, and test their company loyalty by demanding long working hours, including weekends and holidays, that force them to demonstrate practically that their first loyalty is to the company. Given that all these control mechanisms demand a good deal of direct face-toface contact, it is not surprising that companies are deeply resistant to employees working at home. Instead of sharing Vega's assumption that companies will naturally embrace telework's advantages once they are shown the right way to manage it, it would be safer to argue that telework is likely to expand only to the extent that it can provide altemative solutions to this work control problem, and only then if can show clear and present benefits. For certain low-discretion jobs whose work is fundamentally organized around the electronic communication systems, there are a number of direct electronic controls that can substitute for in-person monitoring. In principle, web-cams, keystroke capture, taped telephones and other form of electronic monitoring—electronic ankle monitors anyone?—could be used to replicate the office/factory environment. Report systems can be created to electronically check on the number of customer contacts or completed projects. And if there is good reason to do so, as Vega demonstrates in her own company research, these can be effective stand-ins for direct supervision. They may be a practical solution for employers seeking to tap into a cheap, under- utilized labor pool otherwise unavailable to them—^rural women are often mentioned in the literature. Or the price might be worth paying if local contingencies make a dispersed network of employees highly desirable.^ But they are also costly and go against the grain of accumulated managerial wisdom. Many employers are simply not willing to take the risk at a time when outsourcing such jobs to conventional work-sites overseas may be a cheaper altemative. BUSINESS ETHICS QUARTERLY For high-discretion professionals and skilled workers, on the other hand, the situation is very different. Their work already requires a high degree of trust from employers. Even inside the company, direct control systems have proved inappropriate to monitoring long-term, difficult-to-specify, high expertise work, and telework seems antithetical to the required face-time that has traditionally been part of the professional labor process. However, this may be changing. Companies are now more willing to allow professionals to work "out of the office" because of broader changes in the professional workplace. These changes have gone under a number of headings: "boundaryless careers," "free agency," "just-in-time employment," to list just a few. What these terms signify is a moving away from long-term, inhouse, corporate employment towards more "contingent" arrangements in which workers with a variety of expertise and connections to the company are assembled for short-term projects. There are a number of reasons for this development—the need for just-in-time product development, computerization that flattens managerial hierarchies, an increasingly global workplace amongst others—^but the overall result is that companies are showing a greater willingness to tmst their skilled employees to work off-site. Instead of relying on overt displays of loyalty, employers increasingly look for portfolios that display prior work, reputational networks that rely on other experts rather than their own managers, and even shorter time horizons for evaluation and contract renewal. In other words they are increasingly reverting to a system in which they buy-in professional services through a variety of different contractual forms rather than having it provided by home-grown, in-house professionals. It is to this group of new professionals—and its extent still needs to be empirically determined—that employers may be willing to offer telework, perhaps as part of a broader package of flexible employment. The prospects for telework, therefore, clearly vary by employment sector. For relatively low-skilled employees, if it grows at all it will only be in cases where the costs of electronic monitoring are outweighed by a particular company's needs for a dispersed workforce, and we should not expect companies to want to give up their traditional managerial systems too easily. For highly-skilled workers, on the other hand, the new technologies can assist in what is already a growing type of expert- labor deployment: the short-term project team. Not having to bring experts in from far-a-field, or to create new work-spaces for what may be a temporary assembly of workers has its attractions. To be able to tap into the expertise of a consultant working at home, who may be doing other work at the same time, may be equally appealing. As may the possibility of tapping into another source of scarce expert labor, the pool of parents with young children such as the computer engineer I discussed at the beginning of this review. REVIEW ARTICLE It is, of course, this latter aspect of telework that has made it so appealing to employees as well as employers. As the vignette with which I began this review suggests, theflexibility of working at home is a real opportunity that would be valued by many working parents. In fact one of the advantages that Vega sees it offering employers is its attractiveness to the workforce for this very reason. As we shall see, however, telework's impact on home life may be as equally variable as its impact on work-life, and along a similar dimension. The world ofthe highly skilled professional is very different from that of the unskilled clerical work or phone operator. While the picture I drew of the teleworking computer engineer is dominated by an image of home, a good part of what made the arrangement so valuable was the flexibility it permitted in the timing of work rather than its novel spatial arrangement. If my respondent had been tied to a computer screen or a phone for eight hours a day or longer, responding to a continuous flow of work that required immediate attention, she wouldn't have had the freedom to look after the baby or to pick up the older child from school. It would have been another 9-5 job, just one done in her own home. Perhaps she would have still have preferred that to a long commute, but clearly most of the advantages that accme to working at home do so because we feel we have greater freedom there to regulate the pacing of our work-lives. But, of course, not all telework is like that. In any case, even if there is enough flexibility to allow work to be combined with childcare, should we always assume that this is a desirable option? For some people it clearly is. But it is equally often seen as a necessary, but poor, altemative to scarce or undesirable childcare. Day-care, for a number of interesting cultural and political reasons, has long had a bad press in the US, but even parents who would willingly utilize good facilities find that affordable and accessible childcare is a scarce resource. Before we give telework the seal of approval as a solution for the working mother (and it is always the working mother in these discussions) it is worth asking whether trying to work at home with children underfoot would be seen as desirable if there were access to the high quality, affordable childcare that is readily available in much of Europe. Working at home while looking after young children is certainly possible—I speak from experience—and it is helped by having time-flexibility and the kind of income that can buy cleaning assistance and take- home meals, but it is not clear that either work or childcare is optimized under such circumstances. In fact doing them together may interfere with the positive experience that each may separately provide. In offering telework as the solution to the US's desperate need for childcare, we may simply be positing a technological fix to a problem that requires a much greater societal commitment. Full-time telework may be undesirable for other reasons as well. Many of the people I talked with work part-time at home and part-time in the office, and value both. "If I was at home all the time," one said, "I would go crazy." They want to BUSINESS ETHICS QUARTERLY leave the home, meet their work colleagues, and get an adult life. When a large number of Americans see their work group as a prime support in time of need, working at home could disconnect them from their prime social contacts. This is tme even for professionals who have work contacts off the job and can afford to eat out and hire baby-sitters. And for many Americans, particularly if their work lacks intrinsic interest, the communal work done over lunch or around the water cooler is critically important to developing a sense of work and group identity.' We must remember that for a large number of Americans, including many of those potentially impacted by telework, work is simply not their major source of life satisfaction. Rather it is a necessary evil whose impact needs to be minimized as much as possible. There are good reasons why workers historically resisted bringing work home, why they stmggled for a legislated shorter work-week and for work-free Sundays, and why they fought against company towns and Henry Fords' patemalist "sociologists." Maintaining a defensive wall between home and work has been one way to hmit the employer's reach: psychologically, sociologically and politically. Work may be hard and difficult but its reward, the paycheck, allows the good life to be lived at home, and the distinction between the two has been worth protecting. Perhaps I might be permitted a personal note on this. My father could never understand me working at home. When he lived with us for a while before he died, he couldn't get used to the idea that I could be actually working while seemingly relaxing with a book in a chair. When I came home from my admittedly short and flexible hours at the university, he assumed—well not intellectually, but certainly emotionally-that, I was "at home"; available to do the things that people did at home: fix things, clean things, mow things, and, more importantly, talk to people, socialize, be available. That I read, wrote, and talked for a living was hard enough to grasp, that I did much of it at home was troubling. But then he had spent all of his working life in a factory; leaving from home at seven in the moming returning at five thirty, except on Saturdays when for most of his life he worked until lunchtime. He certainly worked hard at home. There were walls to paint, run-down cars to be repaired, small appliances to be fixed as part of a network of borrowing and bartering that made up working class community life. But "work," the work that paid his wages, the work that occupied forty-nine weeks ofthe year, that work didn't come home. It couldn't. It involved elaborate machines, big, dirty, with a distinct smell of machine oil. It was done in a factory from which, at five o'clock, poured hundreds of people, perhaps thousands. I knew a Httle about my father's work but I never knew what the people who lived around us really did, even though they worked at the same or similar factories. No one ever talked about work. There were occasionally comments about a mysterious "boss," perhaps about a health problem caused by the job, worries about short work-time or—often equally disliked— compulsory over-time. But there were none ofthe discussions of work that can sometimes enlighten my leisure time. For my Dad, for all my family, when I came home from "work" I was supposed to have finished for the day. REVIEW ARTICLE For employees who lack the market or organizational power to resist employers' demands, working at home can threaten this boundary around work. The children themselves may be expected to help keep up with the work. There may be a loss of space for the rest of the household as space for work gets "donated" to the firm, usually without compensation. The "electronic tether" may remain "on," even when the working day ends, donating the worker's own time to the employer. As self- service stores and checkouts akeady testify, companies are expert at extemahzing their own costs under the guise of offering a convenience to others. Telework may offer them additional opportunities and this is particularly true in the American context where legal restrictions on employer encroachment are so weak."* In short, and unsurprisingly, telework's potential impact at home mirrors its impact at work. It benefits most those who akeady hold a privileged position in the workplace. For independent professionals and potential entrepreneurs, telework can be a tool to maximize their freedom in both time and space. They can use it to get their work done while accomplishing other goals. It is a tool for the increased flexibility that such employees have long sought: the freedom to do their job when and where they want. Even here, however, the desire for human contact, the need to get out ofthe house, the need to be able to focus on work or childcare, may suggest telework is more useful as one option in a battery offlexible forms of work than as a full-time, permanent way of life. For other employees, however, perhaps most, the costs of telework may be very high. While it may be a useful alternative for employees who might otherwise have restricted access to jobs, perhaps because of childcare or travel constraints, telework runs the real risk of increasing the exploitation of an already weakened sector of the labor force. For this group, in particular, we owe it ourselves to examine whether "managing telework" is something for govemment as well as employers. IV The success of second wave-feminism and the relative worsening of incomes for working families have together begun to transform our landscape of work and family. Over 60 percent of mothers with children under six are now in the labor force (it was less than 20 percent in the 1950s); some because they seek creative fulfillment in professional work, others because family finances compel them to. In either case, the old spatial and temporal division of labor, mapped as it was on to a traditional gendered one, now makes little sense. It is largely this change in the gendered terrain of work that has made telework so intuitively appealing. For employers it offers the possibility of tapping into a new workforce; for working mothers, the possibility of staying home and earning a living. But we need to be careful before rushing into technological fixes for our social problems. Vega defines telework as "normal" work performed away from the of fice on a regular basis using telecommunications technology" (p. 7). But it may be BUSINESS ETHICS QUARTERLY that the definition of "normal" work, rather than where it gets done, should be the crucial issue for us going forward. In particular, it may be when work gets done, and, perhaps most critically,/or how long, that will matter most. If we worked the kind of hours Europeans do, commuting would be less of an issue—though it would be nice to have better mass transit. If we worked fewer and moreflexible hours, we would have more time to be with our children—though it would be nice to have affordable child care. If work were less demanding, we would have time to make friends in our communities so that we weren't so dependent on the need for the workplace to fill a gap in our hves. If both parents worked less, and more flexibly, both could look after the children and the home. If we had more time telework could provide a useful option even if the work remained tedious and closely monitored. For those lucky enough to have professional skills and who have found ways of managing time demands such as our computer engineer, it already is. Even for these lucky few, however, telework is not a panacea and has begun to raise questions distinctly its own. Will the criteria for being a "good" parent change if we work at home? Will it be acceptable to have ones children help with the work? For how long and doing what? What will our responsibihties be as a good neighbor if we are at home but working? Is the spouse working at home also responsible for the domestic labor? Who pays for the home office? How much time will we owe our company when we could be working twenty-four hours a day? When will it be morally and legally acceptable to not answer the phone or respond to the e-mail? Some of these questions are practical, some legal, some speak to a transformation of gender relations, others to a redefinition of "home" and "workplace." These questions, and many others hke them, clearly go beyond Vega's managerial concerns but Vega'sflawed but important book suggests that we need to place telework on the national agenda, not just as one managerial strategy amongst others but as part of a more extended debate about work and family; an urgent debate that America still needs to have. Notes 1. For more on these interviews with technical professionals with flexible working arrangement, see Peter Meiksins and Peter Whalley, Putting Work in its Place: A Quiet Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002). 2. Vega cites the potential for catastrophic weather events that prevent commuting as one such case; though electronic communication systems are even more vulnerable than roads in the case of such crisis, as Katrina has recently taught us. 3. Robert Putnam. Bowling Alone (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000). 4. Vega suggests that the strength of legal protections against employer's encroachment on their workers' time and privacy may be one reason why telework has been more successful in Europe than in the US.