Teleworking in the Countryside

Home-Based Working in the Information Society

Michael Antony Clark

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351746861
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This title was first published in 2000. Since the 1970s there has been widespread debate on the potential of information communication technologies on the organization of work and in particular, the implications of and opportunities engendered through telework and the decentralization of the workplace. However, despite the possible spatial, cultural, social and economic implications, much of the telework debate has been informed by anecdotal examples, journalistic reporting and individual forecasts. This book aims to further the debate by analyzing the scale, nature and experience of telework in the countryside. It examines how and by whom, telework is set up, and what policy and social changes are taking place to facilitate it in rural areas. Individual teleworkers and the organizations using them are questioned to assess whether rural teleworking is proving as advantageous in practice as it is thought to be in theory. Its conclusions suggest that teleworking may not yet be the solution to the many rural problems such as unemployment and depopulation and that businesses and local authorities still need to develop their policies and strategies to allow this type of working to reach its potential.

PART 1
Introduction and Research Methodology

1 Telework and the Changing Rural Economy

The economy of rural Britain has witnessed considerable restructuring in the post war period. Farming-related employment, the traditional base of the rural economy, has been in continuous decline being replaced by manufacturing and particularly service sector employment. Research into rural employment has tended to focus on the importance of manufacturing jobs throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, in part, engendered from a desire to explore a so called 'urban-rural manufacturing shift'.

However, it has been suggested that the impact of manufacturing growth in rural areas has been overstated and that the greatest increases in rural employment in recent years have been within the service sector, particularly amongst small businesses and self-employment (Cloke et al, 1997). Of particular interest has been the introduction of technology-led service jobs, plugged in to urban-based markets through the introduction of new information technologies into traditionally inaccessible places. Certainly, the development of information and communication technologies (ICT), along with shifts towards non-material production and information-based employment, have engendered considerable speculation as to how their integration may facilitate major shifts in the organisation of work:

With the diffusion of computer network technology, an increasing share of economic activity in different regions will be mediated and integrated through advanced telecommunication systems. [This has enabled] the mediation of work tasks through computer networks [which] is commonly referred to as "teleworking"

(Gillespie and Hepworth, 1988, p. 4).

Teleworking, along with many other labels such as distance working, telecottaging, telecommuting and electronic homeworking, has come to encompass a range of new work practices associated with a spatial re-organisation of employment. Essentially through the integration of information and communication technologies, (termed telematics), such as computers, modems, e-mail and the Internet, a range of information-based occupations have become spatially less constrained. This has enabled them to be performed in more flexible workspaces (such as the home), located outside more traditional workspaces such as the office within the city. Since the 1970s, a wide range of academic, policy and popular literature has focused on the implications of, and opportunities facilitated through, telework and a possible shift of work out of the office and into the home. In many ways telework has been linked to a de-urbanisation of employment and a shift back to a pre-industrial landscape based on hi-tech homeworking in re-vitalised people and place-based communities in the countryside. Such visions have resulted in substantial speculation as to how rural areas may be recipients of these new working practices. This has been particularly so in the popular media, which has focused on the lifestyle opportunities created through telework, and also from policy makers who have viewed telework as a new tool for social and economic development in rural areas.

It is generally accepted that telework principally involves information or knowledge-based occupations in which work tasks can be processed and transmitted via telematics to employers or clients, from remote workspaces such as the home, satellite office or neighbourhood office. However, while there have been attempts to broaden the concept of telework, particularly in relation to the nature of the tele 'workspace' (for example, satellite offices), it has been teleworking from the home which has received the greatest attention from academics, policy makers and the popular media as it has represented the most radical and novel shift in the location of work.

Despite this considerable interest in home-based telework, many academic researchers have encountered definitional problems when attempting to select and locate home-based teleworkers to study. This has resulted in the development of a number of competing definitions rather than one generally agreed definition of telework. For example, telework has been defined as working at home for a significant proportion of working time, in order to exclude those who only make incidental use of a computer at home or who simply use the home as a base and as such should not be included in a definition of telework.

In addition, central to most interpretations of telework has been the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to produce and communicate work to and from organisations. For instance, Cross and Raizman (1986) defined telework as performing job-related work at a site away from the office and then transferring the results electronically to the office or other locations. Huws (1993) stated that a teleworker should use both a computer device and telecommunications device in undertaking the work, as they would be unable to work at home without using this technology. However, one can question whether a person (for example a freelance journalist), becomes a 'teleworker' if s/he already works from home and simply upgrades from a typewriter to a computer. Given these arguments, it is important to recognise that teleworkers should not necessarily be characterised by their use of technology, but by the nature of their work, in that it involves the production and communication of information from home.

It is also important to recognise that limiting definitions to just those workers who use telecommunications technology to work at home might be too restrictive. As such, definitions of telework should be based on a broader conception of remote communication between the worker and client/employer. Examples of such working methods are where postal and courier services are used to send disks or hard copies to clients, and where the telephone is used to maintain effective contact with organisations.

While academics have based their research upon these broader conceptions of telework, they have still considered what appear to be a broad range of non-exclusive working practices as telework. More specifically, much of the research has focused on teleworking employees working for a single employer and receiving all the pay and benefits as on site staff - as well as self-employed or freelance teleworkers - small businesses or independent contractors working for a variety of client organisations on a contract. However, while it has been noted that the motivations behind, and characteristics and experiences of, employed and self-employed telework differ considerably, researchers have tended to ignore this fact, often confusing the experience of telework with homeworking rather than contractual status. For example, Olson (1988) has indicated that:

People who work at home work under a variety of conditions of employment. There has been considerable confusion caused by the tendency to generalise across different conditions. A greater problem has been the tendency to attribute abuses (or potential abuses) of workers to the fact that they are at home rather than to the conditions of their employment

(p. 80).

It is therefore dangerous and ambiguous, to use telework as a label for such a variety of work practices simply on the basis that individuals use remote communications to work from home. After all, telework, as with 'office working', is simply a way of working and not a job per se. Indeed, Rawlins (1990) suggested 'you will never get advertisements saying "teleworker wanted"' (p. 5). Rather telework is a new method by which a range of information-based occupations can be undertaken. Ultimately, it can be questioned what these different work arrangements termed telework have in common and subsequently the extent to which telework forms an identifiable unit of measurement. Craipiau and Marot (1984), quoted by Cross and Burton (1993), suggested that 'a pluristical and monolithic definition of telework ... would ultimately be abstract and unrealistic' (p. 349). Subsequently they argued the existence of various degrees and types of telework such as that of self-employed and employee teleworkers. In addition, Huws et al (1990) suggested that:

These many difficulties facing the researcher attempting to produce a clear definition of telework prompt the question, why bother? If a concept is as nebulous as this, then wouldn't it be better to abandon it and develop a different framework for analysis more amenable to precise categorisation? Perhaps instead of focusing on telework, we should be concentrating on a study of the changing geographical organisation of work, or new travel patterns, or the use of information technology by home-based workers, or new forms of contractual relationships between employers and workers, or of changing patterns of work organisation

(p. 8).

Although in this statement, Huws et al (1990) advocate the rejection of telework as a useful analytical definition, it does appear that recent shifts towards more flexible forms of capitalist accumulation have given rise to particular, dominant forms of telework. More specifically, telework has been linked to organisational change, corporate rationalisation, increases in the levels of sub-contracting and the growth of flexible employment patterns such as self-employment. In particular, home-based telework can be linked to the growth in sub-contracting and the growth of self-employed individuals working from home. Moreover, it has been suggested that, while employed telework will increasingly address a declining part of the workforce (Mitchell 1995), the vast majority of homeworking individuals consist of independent self-employed contractors who have set up their own information-based business, which happens to be based at home (Olson, 1988).

Self-employed telework also appears to have the greatest relevance for rural areas. For instance, popular notions of telework, offered by a number of commentators, and seen in the popular literature, have focused on telework as representing a set of combined lifestyle and workstyle shifts from living and working for an organisation in the city to living and working for oneself in the countryside. Moreover, whilst self-employmen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• PART 1 INTRODUCTION AND RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
• PART 2 THE FACILITATION OF, AND DEMAND FOR, TELEWORK
• PART 3 THE SUPPLY OF TELEWORK
• Bibliography