In Work, At Home

Towards an Understanding of Homeworking

Alan Felstead, Nick Jewson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Topic: Economics
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134714599
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Economics

More and more people are choosing to earn a living at home. In Work, At Home explores the meaning and experience of this type of employment by covering a wide range of issues including:
* social relationships
* current research methodologies
* statistical analyses of global labour markets
* the emotional and psychological processes of self-management
* home relations.
Presenting statistical analyses of labour markets in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia, In Work, At Home provides a valuable introduction to the issues and debates surrounding homeworking and will appeal to students across a range of disciplines, including sociology, business studies and women's studies.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Setting the agenda

The field of enquiry

This is a book about people who are in work at home. All over the world they are found in a huge range of occupations and industries undertaking a multiplicity of tasks. They include lace makers in rural India, freelance architects in downtown Manhattan and lockstitchers in the back streets of Manchester. Indeed, they are almost as diverse as those who carry out their work in offices and factories. This broad category of employment we have called home-located production.

Home-located production should not be confused with homeworking which, in our terms, is much more narrowly defined. The aim of this book is to contribute towards an understanding of homeworking by placing it in the context of home-located production in its entirety. The reader will find that we routinely switch between discussing these two concepts – the foreground and background of our analysis.

Formal definitions of these and other key concepts are provided in Chapter 2. However, it may be useful here to offer a description of the kind of tasks undertaken by homeworkers and the sort of jobs they do. Homeworking is conventionally thought of as involving manual jobs carried out in manufacturing industry and routine service occupations. Substantial numbers of garment makers and machinists fall into this category. However, there are many other occupations involved and, as we shall see, there is a danger of reproducing long-standing stereotypes based on unfounded assumptions. A perusal of HomeNet – an international newsletter linking homeworkers and campaigning organisations – indicates the diverse character of the jobs that homeworkers do across the world. Table 1.1 provides an alphabetical list derived from this source and our own research. It is by no means exhaustive but does offer an indication of the breadth and scope of homeworking world-wide.

There are practical limitations to the type of work which can be carried out at home but such restrictions are, to some extent, historically and culturally specific. For example, in the late nineteenth century, nail-making and chain-making in Britain were predominately carried out in people’s homes. At that time around half of all British nails and chains were produced in domestic premises in and around Birmingham (Bythell 1978).

Table 1.1 The A–Z of homeworking activities across the world

However, homeworking should not be regarded merely as a relic of history that is gradually fading into insignificance (Mitter 1986a). Contemporary technological innovations are continuing to create new opportunities for earning a living at home (Huws 1994; Huws et al. 1996). Typesetting, for example, has only recently become amenable to homeworking. Before the advent of the microprocessor the manipulation of fonts, print sizes, layout and page make-up was technically complex and subject to occupational closure by craft-trained print compositors (Cockburn 1983). Nowadays, however, even the most rudimentary home computer allows users to undertake all of these tasks with relative ease (cf. Felstead 1988).

Not only technological innovation but also changing managerial strategies are opening up new possibilities for homeworking. Modern methods of controlling costs and regulating labour have introduced the ‘hollowed out’ corporation, outsourcing, subcontracting, just-in-time supply and the enhanced use of all forms of ‘non-standard’ employment (Felstead and Jewson 1999). These may offer new opportunities to relocate paid work into the home (e.g., Boris and Prügl 1996). In addition, there remain a number of trades which have for long relied on homeworking. Foremost among these are the garment and clothing industries (Phizacklea 1990). Here, only parts of the production process have been revolutionised by technology. Assembly, in particular, remains dependent on human labour – for example, overlocking edges to prevent them from fraying and lockstitching garments together. These activities are still carried out using latterday variants of the sewing machine invented in the mid-nineteenth century (Rainnie 1984). Thus, a contemporary A–Z of homeworking covers a range of ‘old’ and ‘new’ activities.

The variety of work carried out in the home widens much further when the broader concept of home-located production becomes the focus (e.g., Hakim 1987a; Kraut and Grambsch 1987; Nadwodny 1996; Lafferty et al. 1997). Journalists, artists, lawyers, architects, accountants, consultants, teachers and a host of other freelance workers who earn a living at home fall into this category. A looser definition, including those who work at home some of the time, captures even more of the working population (Presser and Bamberger 1993). Hence, to seek to construct an ‘average’ picture for such a disparate group – at least as far as the work they do, how they do it and what rewards they get – is highly misleading, as later chapters will show.

Why study working at home?

What attracts sociologists, economists, geographers, psychologists and business analysts to the study of people who earn their living at home? Why are homeworkers of interest to policy-makers and managers? We hope that the answers to these questions will emerge during the course of this book. However, the following comprises a preliminary indication of some of the more intriguing aspects of home-located production that make it an absorbing and engrossing field of research.

• Home-located production and homeworking bring together two great spheres of contemporary social life – home and work – that have become increasingly differentiated during industrialisation.
• World-wide the numbers of homeworkers and home-located producers appears to have sharply increased in recent decades – although the rate of increase has not always matched the heroic expectations of futurologists, management gurus and some academics.
• Mass access to the Internet heralds an immanent and revolutionary leap in the number of jobs that could potentially be done at home for all or part of the time.
• The growth of home-located production and homeworking are part of a larger shift in the character of labour markets which has resulted in the proliferation of ‘non-standard’ employment.
• Working at home has sometimes been portrayed as a utopian solution to the principle ills of modern society, promising to restore work satisfaction and rejuvenate family relations.
• Campaigners and some academic researchers have highlighted the grim realities faced by many of those who work at home, emphasising their poor terms and conditions, their relative disadvantage compared to workplace peers, and the stresses they encounter in reconciling ‘two worlds in one’.
• Homeworking is concentrated among some of the most deprived groups in the labour market – such as women and ethnic minorities – but this is not true of home-located production in general.
• Juggling the twin demands of paid employment and domestic life in the same locale calls forth distinctive coping strategies that shape the emotional and psychological dispositions of home-located producers.
• Although the attitudes of home-located producers have much in common with the personality types currently demanded by ‘leading edge’ managerial ideologies, employers often appear to regard working at home as problematic.
• Working at home poses problems for conventional modes of labour organisation, control and surveillance that are of interest to both trade unions and management.
• The growth of home-located production raises a raft of social policy issues – including such matters as transportation, urban and rural planning, architectural design, electronic infrastructure, commercial property values, health and safety, and employment law.
• Despite the significance of these trends, home-located production and homeworking remain under-researched and conceptually confused.

The origins of this book

This book arises from our own experience of researching people who work at home. Although its scope is very broad, it does not purport to deal with all the issues and themes that scholars in the field have raised. It does not, for example, consider the social and economic history of homeworking, which has been discussed elsewhere (Boris 1994; Boris and Daniels 1989; Pennington and Westover 1989; Bythell 1978). Nor does it highlight the operations of transnational corporations, that lock increasing numbers of homeworkers and home-located producers into global economic networks of dependency (Mitter 1986a; Boris and Prügl 1996; Tate 1996a, 1996b). Instead, this book focuses on the many enduring puzzles and unresolved questions that we have encountered in the course of our work. Our aim here, then, is to address what we regard as some of the most challenging issues entailed in studying people in work at home. We will introduce these themes by briefly recounting the history of our involvement before, in the next section, stating specifically the questions tackled in each chapter.

In 1994 we successfully bid for a government-funded research contract – sponsored by the then Employment Department (ED) – to carry out one of the largest surveys of homeworkers ever conducted in Britain. In this way, we began a hectic year – subsequently extended to 15 months – in which we undertook a wide range of different research activities in a variety of geographical settings. This very stimulating period rapidly caused us to question many aspects of home-located production and homeworking that previously we had taken for granted. Along the learning curve we managed to complete the project and publish our findings (Felstead and Jewson 1996). In the process we discovered a great deal. However, we reached the end of the project with as many questions as we had begun.

At this point, we felt that conceptual clarification was urgently needed. Some of our early thoughts in this area were published the following year (Felstead and Jewson 1997). In addition, a range of new empirical questions surfaced in our minds, including some which the remit of the ED project had prevented us from exploring. Foremost among these were a number of issues concerning the ways in which home-located producers manage to combine the demands of domestic life with those of paid employment. Accordingly, with the support of a small grant from the Faculty of the Social Sciences Research Board at the University of Leicester, in 1997 we undertook a qualitative study of 23 home-located producers. This was completed in 1998 and the findings are published for the first time in this book. Although only a small study, the rich interview data we obtained shifted our focus yet again to an examination of the meaning and experience of working at home.

An even more undeveloped area of research concerns the management process of home-located production and especially the consequences and implications it has for the organisation of work as a whole. Does home-located production prompt the redesign of jobs both inside and outside the workplace, or are traditional management controls – such as piece rates – applied to the invisible workforce? We have surprisingly little evidence to answer these questions. This has opened up another research agenda which we are currently pursuing with the financial support of a research grant secured under the Economic and Social Research Council’s (ESRC) Future of Work Initiative. This project will, in addition, further investigate another facet of home-located production that has increasingly figured in our analysis of those who are in work, at home: that is, the social relations of home and household. These constitute the social and spatial context of home-located production and indeed are its defining feature. Although often acknowledged as having vital significance for the understanding of home-located production relatively few researchers have investigated these relationships in-depth. Many questions and issues, therefore, remain to be thoroughly explored.

This, then, briefly sketches the history of our research in this field to date. In order to explain further how we arrived at the agenda for this book we need to excavate some of the layers of this experience in more depth. There are two reasons for this. First, at various points in subsequent chapters, we will draw upon the results of different facets of our work in developing the argument and analysis. It is necessary, therefore, to explain the methodologies we adopted and our use of terminology. Second, the chapters address problems, issues and questions we encountered in the practical exigencies of doing research and in wrestling with the challenges they posed.

Analysis of official data

Many of our initial and continuing research questions – how many, how often, who, where, what, when and so on – were quantitative in nature. Not surprisingly, therefore, we turned – as have many others – to official data sets, with their large samples and government-backed resources, for the answers.

We began work on the Employment Department (ED) project with an examination of available British official data sets, such as the quarterly Labour Force Survey (LFS), Workplace Industrial Relations Survey (WIRS) and the 1991 Census. It immediately became apparent that none of these contained answers to all of our questions and that each used different definitions. It was, therefore, very difficult to compare results. Despite an apparent wealth of data, there were many traps for the unwary; for example, the same terms were commonly used in various data sets to describe different categories of people who work at home. The first lesson we quickly learned, therefore, was that official statistics require careful and detailed investigation of the assumptions, definitions and techniques of data collection and compilation. The implication is that national and international comparisons are fraught with difficulties.

We decided to focus mainly on the Census because it gives a geographical slant not available elsewhere. The results of the 1991 Census provided us with a national picture and enabled us to select local research sites for further work (Felstead and Jewson 1995). The results were not always what we expected, particularly with respect to rural areas where there were many more people working at home than we anticipated. This once again raised our suspicions about the conceptual and operational basis of the figures. It also heightened our awareness of theoretical and semantic problems in framing apparently simple and readily understood survey questions.

Despite these reservations, the Census alerted us to the possibility that homeworking and home-located production may by no means be confined to traditional geographical areas and a limited number of social groups. This, combined with an emphasis in the ED brief on an investigation of so-called ‘untypical’ geographical areas, made us suspect that home-located production is a more ubiquitous and diverse phenomenon than often imagined. Much of the limited research which has been done in Britain comes from and tends to be carried out by campaign groups (e.g., Yorkshire and Humberside Low Pay Unit 1991; West Yorkshire Homeworking Unit 1992; Huws 1994). Valuable though this work is in many respects, it has the unfortunate effect of confirming stereotypes of homeworkers. This is because much of it has been conducted in the localities where campaigning groups are best organised and funded – which happen to be industrial cities with long-standing clothing and garment industries. Official data, however, led us to wonder whether this image has obscured a more complex and varied pattern. Exploration of this issue became one of the objectives of our further work using other methods.

Doorstep survey

We decided to initiate a large scale doorstep survey in four geographical localities in Britain, urban and rural, focusing on nine local areas. The latter corresponded to electoral wards or (in Scotland) postal sectors that figured in the Census. The survey entailed calling on approximately every other household in all residential streets. Our researchers knocked on 15,623 doors in all. In order to make the questions short and concise, it was decided simply to ask whoever answered the door: ‘Have you, or anyone else in your household, done any paid work at home during the last twelve months?’ Those who responded positively were asked how many people were involved and what type of work they had been doing. Individuals in manufacturing and lower-status service sector jobs were asked whether they would be willing to participate in an in-depth interview.

Quite a few colleagues doubted whether this strategy would yield useful results. Nevertheless, with a great deal of trepidation, we embarked upon this not inconsiderable task. Fortunately, the doorstep survey was a success. Its aim was to obtain a quantitative measure of the numbers of people who work at home. We were able to generate figures for each electoral ward/postal district which were congruent and plausible in the light of other official estimates. There were, however, problems. These included households where there was no reply, difficulties in operationalising responses and negative returns from respondents who we had every reason to believe were earning a living at home.

The doorstep survey was also used to generate a sample of homeworkers for indepth interview (discussed on pp.). Again, we were pleased with the outcome. In some areas most of our in-depth interviews came from doorstepping, although in others we had to resort to ‘topping up’ from other sources. Our success owed much to the very high quality of the research teams employed in different parts of the country. These were selected in the light of local circumstances, ethnic and gender differences, and the anticipated anxieties of potential respondents. Their skills in establishing rapport and making contact with respondents, who were often cautious and uncertain, were essential to the outcome of the project. All this experience made us focus on the problems of searching for subjects. Indeed, there was a period when we were almost obsessed with ways of making contact with potential respondents, some of which proved to be much more effective than others.

A further aim of the doorstep survey was to generate estimates of numbers of homeworkers in a range of different types of localities, including areas renowned for homeworking and others which appeared to have little history. This proved to be extremely revealing. In one location, in particular, we were told by local economic analysts that we would find nothing. However, on the ground we discovered a rich and complex pattern of homeworking and home-located production, albeit one different in detail from so-called ‘typical’ areas. This led us to believe that earning a living at h...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Appendix
• References