Centre for technology and society			Institute for social research in industry
Norwegian University of Science and Technology	SINTEF Industrial Management

ICT AND THE FLEXIBILITY OF EVERYDAY LIFE

1. Problem outline - first take

The study will focus on the use of ICT to make everyday life more flexible, in relation to the  changing notions of the workplace and observed from the perspective of the household. For a long time, telework was seen as an alternative to ‘normal’ work. In Norway and Sweden, the main attraction was to facilitate the combination of rural life and paid work. The idea of the telecottage, popular in regional policies of the 1980s, is an epithet of this perception. However, this idea failed and failed again.

What has happened recently, is the development of new ideas about the nature of telework. One is the concept of the nomadic way of working, which is based on the idea of “working everywhere”. New ICT is used to allow mobile work and communication. The outcome is the virtual workplace, the workplace that is here and everywhere. The other concept is the idea of the home office or the home computer. In this case, new ICT is employed to facilitate a bi-modal spatial distribution of work. The main bulk of work is performed at the workplace, but some parts are being done from home through the use of computers that have access to a server at the workplace. Our project will concentrate on the latter phenomenon.

Of course, there is in principle nothing new about the phenomenon of working overtime at home. However, it seems reasonable to assume that the netted home computer has changed the rules of the game. This is due to the potential of the netted home computer to allow for communication as well as the access to work material. For example, emails be accessed and responded to from home as well as from the workplace.  And more and more jobs involve such information catering.

On the other hand, the situation is ambiguous. People have different ambitions, they have different ideas about the need to distinguish between work and non-work, and the contexts of their decisions differ. Single people may prefer to stay at the workplace after normal hours, because this facilitates social life. Parents may, on the other hand, feel obliged to go home as quickly as possible, to available to and care for their children - in between working.
Moreover, the idea of teleworking raises important challenges to the idea of work. Studies from the 1980s suggested that a major barrier to telework was the inherent problems of controlling the workforce. Thus, telework became a matter of trust. In the age of teamwork, there is an increasing concern that employees may need to meet face to face in order to do the job. Even if there are computer tools that claim to support collaborative work, this claim is not believed by many managers - probably for good reasons. 

Thus, our idea is to study different shapes of teleworking from home as a way of supplementing ordinary office work. Important dimensions in this study will be:

•	the idea of greedy organisations (Hochschild) that represent a pressure to moonlight from home
•	the challenge of the “corrosion of character” (Sennett), which points to the problem of lack of workplace roots
•	the relative attraction of the different ways of performing “boundary work” between home and work - integrators versus segmentators (Nippert Eng).
•	variations of emphasis place upon the social and interactive nature of work
•	the “greedy family” that demands presence at home
•	gendered patterns and constructions
•	the different points of view of industrial partners and of governments.

We believe that there are many ways of domesticating the netted home computer, which on the one hand give rise to different practices, but on the other may create dynamic and contradictive meanings. The possibility of national patterns or structures of domestication is in this respect less fascinating than the idea that home-work relations may be performed in many ways through the utilisation of ICT.

The above ideas will be further developed in dialogue with the person employed as a post doc to work on the project.

2. Methodology

The obvious way to do the study is to interview households and/or individuals at work. However, such interviews are complicated, time-consuming and raises important problems about representativity etc. and there is the issue of how many. Still, it is  probably necessary.

Supplementary sources do exist, like policy documents, survey material and even existing interview materials. 

The most pressing problem, however, is the development of a pragmatic comparative approach. Our project is flagged as a pan-European comparative study. This challenge may be dealt with in two ways. Either by emphasizing the policy aspects and focusing on policy material. Or by defining ‘comparative’ as case-comparative rather than nationally comparative, exploiting the pan-European nature of Emtel to provide variation of cases rather than variation of nations. In terms of the general aims of Emtel, the latter option is more productive than the former. But both may be allowed.

3. Supporting projects

Both of the participating institutions in Trondheim have considerable activity in the area of ICT and work. This includes studies of knowledge workers, nomadic work and telework.