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"When [S]He is Working [S]He is Not at Home": Challenging

Assumptions About Remote Work
Eric Lohman
The University of Western Ontario

Supervisor
Dr. Nick Dyer-Witheford
The University of Western Ontario

Graduate Program in Media Studies

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree in Doctor of
Philosophy
© Eric Lohman 2015

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"WHEN [S]HE IS WORKING [S]HE IS NOT AT HOME": CHALLENGING
ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT REMOTE WORK

(Monograph Thesis)

by

Eric Lohman

Graduate Program in Media Studies

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

The School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies

The University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario, Canada
 Eric Lohman 2015

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-

Noncommercial 3.0 United States License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/

ii
 Abstract
In this monograph thesis, I explore how at the end of the first decade of the twenty-
first century, the prospects for telework, rather than following a straightforward and
inexorably rising trajectory, became strangely complex and conflicted. This project explores
the reasons for the apparently contradictory and certainly confusing state of telework. It is
about these contradictions, and more specifically about who benefits from telework
arrangements, and under what conditions these arrangements are deployed.
The study adopts a mixture of qualitative methodologies, including political
economic analysis, reviews of popular press articles, and in-depth interviews. The political
economic analysis explores the costs and benefits of remote work, specifically how workers
and employers are affected financially. We may have to reconsider whether flexible work
arrangements will be the norm in work environments of the future, because of capital’s
inability to manage the work process effectively and its loss of the benefits of spontaneous
interaction between co-workers.
In the chapter devoted to the popular press, I analyze news stories that discussed
Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer’s 2013 decision to end telework. This is the first discourse
analysis of telework coverage in the popular press. I argue that Mayer was subjected to unfair
coverage in the press, which was largely based on her role as a woman and mother.
Finally, I conducted a series of in-depth interviews with teleworkers, with unique
arrangements and diverse professions. The insistence by tech company giants like Google
that worker interaction is vital to creative labor is supported by my interviews with
teleworkers, who contend that the biggest disadvantage to working from home is reduced
social interaction with their coworkers.
The thread that ties all three of these methodological approaches together is the
critique of the conventional assumption that telework is an unqualifiedly positive
arrangement for workers, and an inevitable staple of future work environments. My research
exposes the problems with this assumption. Overlooking the disadvantages that telework
actually presents for workers, and also the very different disadvantages it can pose for
capital, has also caused an overstatement of the importance of telework in Post-Fordist labour
environments.

Keywords
Marissa Mayer, Telework, Remote Work, Telecommuting, Labor, Political Economy,
Feminism, Autonomist Marxism

iii
 Acknowledgments

I would first like to thank Nick Dyer-Witheford for his expertise, insight, patience,
and his willingness to look at unpolished drafts. I have benefitted tremendously from his
guidance and friendship. Thank you to Pam McKenzie and Carole Farber for their help along
the way, especially with methodology issues. I would like to thank Marnie Harrington, who
like every good librarian, has been trusted counsel on all issues brought before her. From the
day I landed in Canada, till the final throes of this project, Marnie has offered indispensible
assistance, for which I am so grateful. I would like to thank Jonathan Burston for his
mentorship, specifically around my teaching. I was fortunate to study with a brilliant group
of scholars and collaborators in the Media Studies doctoral program; those who deserve the
most thanks are Gemma Richardson and Estee Fresco, whose bright minds and warm
friendship made this arduous endeavor seem less daunting. I have learned a tremendous
amount from Austin Walker, Kate Hoad-Reddick, Indranil Chakraborty, Atle Kjosen, Jeff
Thomas, Lillian Dang, Elise Thorburn, Warren Steele, Andrea Benoit, and Nichole Winger.
This is not an expansive list by any means.
My time in London, Ontario was made all the richer by having a group of friends to
commiserate with. Many of these people I met through my time serving in student
organizations and or conducting union work. Amanda Vyce has become a surrogate aunt to
my children, a lunch buddy, and dear friend. Desiree, Mike, and Remi Lameroux have
become a family away from home, and will be truly missed. Finally, Josh and Marylynn
Steckly deserve credit for being available for coffee and impromptu babysitting whenever I
needed it, which was very often. I hope all of them know how much their friendship has
meant to my family and me over the last five years.
All of the work I have done is truly for the benefit of my children, Deven and Delilah
Velez, and Silas and Rosalie Lohman. I know it has been a sacrifice for you, but I trust that
over time you will all come to understand this foolish enterprise. If nothing else, I hope that
you find some inspiration in my desire to forgo money in the pursuit of intellectual
stimulation, and do the same. After all this writing, I lack the words to effectively convey
how grateful I am for Stephani Lohman. I will not lie and say that she was always patient, or
that her tone was always helpful, but without her knowledge, wits, editing abilities,
budgeting, humor, and encouragement, this project could simply have never been completed.

iv
There is much, much more that she has done to help me, but I’m so tired of writing that you
will have to take my word for it.

v
 Table of Contents
ABSTRACT III

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS IV

LIST OF TABLES IX

LIST OF APPENDICES X

INTERROGATING TELEWORK: CHALLENGING ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT THE FUTURE AND BENEFITS OF

WORKPLACE FLEXIBILITY 1

METHODOLOGY 5
POLITICAL ECONOMIC ANALYSIS 6
CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS 8
IN-DEPTH INTERVIEWS 9
CHAPTER OUTLINE 10

A REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE ON TELEWORK 13

DEFINITION, MEASUREMENT, AND SCOPE OF TELEWORK 16

MANAGEMENT OF TELEWORKERS 20
TRAVEL RELATED IMPACTS OF TELEWORK 23
ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE AND ISOLATION 25
BOUNDARIES BETWEEN HOME AND WORK 28
IMPACT OF TELEWORK ON THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE FAMILY 31
GAPS IN THE RESEARCH AND AVENUES TO EXPLORE 34

HARDLY THE PANACEA: UNPACKING THE COSTS AND BENEFITS OF TELEWORK 38

SAVINGS FOR COMPANIES 41

COSTS TO WORKERS 47
COSTS TO COMPANIES 55
ANALYSIS AND CONCLUSION 61

THE MOTHER OF ALL HYPOCRITES: MARISSA MAYER AND THE YAHOO! TELEWORK BAN IN THE
POPULAR PRESS 68

vi
METHODOLOGY 70
WHY BAN TELEWORK?: “THE LATEST INNOVATION FOR CREATING INNOVATION.” 78
TELEWORK: EMPLOYEE PERK OR A WORKER’S RIGHT? 81
DEFENDING MAYER’S BAN 84
CRITICISMS OF MAYER AND THE BAN 85
“PAINFUL IRONY:” CRITICISM OF MARISSA MAYER 86
“THAT NURSERY!” MARISSA MAYER AS A HYPOCRITE 87
“I REALLY THOUGHT WORKPLACES WERE MOVING TOWARD MORE FLEXIBILITY.” 91
DISCUSSION 92
CONCLUSION 95

THE FLIPSIDE OF FLEXIBILITY: TELEWORK AND THE MYTH OF WORK/LIFE BALANCE 100

LITERATURE REVIEW 101

METHODOLOGY 103
“I’M IN THE ZONE”: THE ADVANTAGES OF TELEWORKING 107
THE DREADED COMMUTE 109
“I CAN THROW IN A LOAD OF LAUNDRY:” WEAVING IN PERSONAL PRODUCTIVITY 111
THE PROFESSIONAL, SOCIAL, AND PSYCHOLOGICAL DOWNSIDE TO TELEWORK 113
OUT OF THE FLOW: LATENCY IN OPERATIONS AND COMPLICATING SIMPLE WORK TASKS 114
PROFESSIONAL REPERCUSSIONS OF TELEWORKING 117
TELEWORKING AND OVERWORKING 119
“I GET TO HAVE MY CHRISTMAS PARTY IN MY KITCHEN!:” TELEWORK AND ISOLATION 121
CONCLUSIONS: “IT’S LIKE HAVING SHACKLES ON YOU ALL THE TIME.” 125

CONCLUSION 131

CHAPTER REFLECTIONS 132

THE STRUGGLE OVER MOMENTS: COMMON THREADS BETWEEN THE CHAPTERS 136
MARXIST FEMINISMS AND TELEWORK 138
AVENUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH 143

BIBLIOGRAPHY 146

APPENDICES 165

RECRUITMENT ADVERTISEMENT 165

vii
WESTERN’S RESEARCH ETHICS BOARD APPROVAL 166
LETTER OF INFORMATION AND CONSENT FORM 167
INTERVIEW QUESTIONS 170
CURRICULUM VITAE 173

viii
 List of Tables

Table 1: Participant Demographics ---------------------------------------------------------- page 105

ix
 List of Appendices
 Recruitment Advertisement
 Western's Research Ethics Board Approval
 Letter of Information and Informed Consent Form
 List of Interview Questions

x
"He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home."
Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

xi
 1

Interrogating Telework: Challenging Assumptions About the

Future and Benefits of Workplace Flexibility

Since it was first conceptualized in the 1970s, telework— the use of digital

technology to bring work to employees, rather than employees to work— has enjoyed

varying levels of interest, but seems to have attained peak attention from businesses and

governments alike after the turn of the 21st century. The Telework Research Network, a

consulting and research organization that “specializes in making the business case for

workplace flexibility,” published a report in 2011 that found telework had risen in the

United States by 73% between 2005 and 2011, and was likely to increase another 69% by

2016 (Lister and Harnish, 2011). Fortune Magazine reported in February of that same

year that 82% of the companies that made its annual “100 Best Companies to Work For”

list allow employees to telecommute or work at home at least 20% of the time. In 2010

the United States government passed the Telework Enhancement Act, designed “to

require the head of each executive agency to establish and implement a policy under

which employees shall be authorized to telework” (United States Congress, 2010).

A 2012 press release from Cisco Systems, a leading technology firm that also

promotes telework, reported that the one-quarter of federal employees in the US had

adopted telework since the Telework Enhancement Act came into effect (Best, 2012). In

1997, executives at American retail giant Best Buy instituted their own brand of telework

at the corporate offices in Minnesota called ROWE, or Results-Only Work

Environments, in which employees were not required to attend any meetings or show up

to work at all, so long as their designated tasks were completed correctly and efficiently.
 2

The ROWE pilot program at Best Buy was so successful that the two human resource

specialists who designed it became independent consultants with their own company,

CultureRX, which specialized in converting traditional offices to ROWE.

Yet at the very moment telework seemed triumphant, contrary tendencies

appeared. To the surprise of many, Best Buy terminated its famously flexible telework

policy in late 2012, citing a need to have employees connecting face-to-face in order to

identify ways to strengthen the bottom line. Best Buy’s spokesperson said, “when

possible, all employees should be in the office so they can collaborate on making the

company even better" (Ojeda-Zapata, 2013). Even more dramatically, the multinational

Internet corporation Yahoo ended its telework policy in early 2013, much to the chagrin

of commentators on workplace flexibility. Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s CEO cited the exact

same reason as Best Buy for ending the program. In a Fortune article from April 2013,

Mayer said "People are more productive when they're alone, but they're more

collaborative and innovative when they're together. Some of the best ideas come from

pulling two different ideas together" (Tcaczyk, 2013). Mayer claimed that bringing

people together to work alongside one another was the first step in producing the type of

social interaction that she believed was necessary for innovative work (Ojeda-Zapata,

2013).

Indeed, some of the most successful technology companies of the information

economy have prioritized located working over telework, citing collaboration and social

interaction as the primary factor in making that decision. Google, Facebook, and Apple

discourage telework, instead choosing to entice employees with free meals and pool

tables to keep them in the office, working and talking with one another (San Jose
 3

Mercury News Editorial Board, 2013). Google specifically has created a veritable

playground at its Mountain View, California campus in order to keep employees

comfortable and stimulated while working from the offices. Telework is kept to a

minimum at Google, as it is at Facebook and Apple, reserved only for afterhours work

(Amerland, 2013).

At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the prospects for

telework, rather than following a straightforward and inexorably rising trajectory,

suddenly seemed strangely complex and conflicted. This project explores the reasons for

the apparently contradictory and certainly confusing state of telework. It is about these

contradictions, and more specifically about who benefits from telework arrangements,

and under what conditions these arrangements are deployed.

Using a mixed methodological process encompassing multiple qualitative

approaches, including reviews of popular discussions of telework in the press, political

economic analysis of telework, and a series of guided interviews with laborers in

telework environments, I discovered that some of the premises underpinning predictions

about the future growth of telework are flawed. Certainly telework has benefits for both

workers and employers, but ultimately capital’s interests determine how work is

arranged, and those interests shift in unpredictable ways. The fact that the giants of the

digital economy such as Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and Apple do not allow full-time

telework, but do allow workers to connect from home after hours suggests that these

companies are not completely against employees’ teleworking, they merely oppose it as a

permanent, full-time arrangement. Moreover, the belief that workplace flexibility is an

 4

unqualified benefit for working families must also be challenged. As I will demonstrate,

the downside to telework is far more disturbing than has been previously considered.

In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx said of the worker:

"He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home"

(Marx, 1988). This quote perfectly captures the fact that a healthy, clear boundary

between work and home is paramount to the worker's ability to enjoy leisure time. In fact,

according to Marx, home is defined as not being work, and vice versa. In this passage,

Marx was writing philosophically, identifying the alienation or estrangement imposed by

exploitative labour, rather than literally referring to the worker’s location. He was very

well aware that in early capitalism workers were in fact sometimes forced to work at

home, in what could be seen as a forerunner to telework—the domestic labour practiced

in craft industries such as weaving—which he identified as amongst some of the most

pitilessly arduous and poorly paid of its era. In Capital, Marx details the horrors of

working in these cottage or home industries. Children as young as four or five were

forced to work as much as 12 hours a day at a cottage, and then were sent home late in

the evening with piles of lace to work on overnight (Marx, 1977, p. 596-7). In Marx's

judgment, the feelings of alienation or estrangement wrought by capitalism were the

feelings of not being "at home," which was unrelated to where one actually worked.

However, in a contemporary context his words pointedly raise the question of how

workers given the supposedly liberating option of working from home may find this

actually destroys their one refuge from the discipline of labour.

The prevailing mythology is that telework is a win-win for workers and capital;

that everyone benefits from increased flexibility between the home and workplace. The
 5

reality of the situation is that capital is the primary beneficiary of telework arrangements,

which are used strategically as a means of intensifying the exploitation of workers, who

are made ever more precarious, and who are overworked routinely, when working by

remote. Whether or not telework is increasing or decreasing, or whether a company

allows telework, overlooks telework's main function, which is to allow capitalism to

extract surplus value from workers all the time, from anywhere. Telework converts the

proverbial home into a perpetual workplace; the teleworker then is never at home, but

always at work.

Methodology

This research project sought to understand what is gained and lost in the North

American telework environment of the early 21st century, from the perspective of both

employers and workers by examining telework functions from a number of different

perspectives. It uses a mixed methods approached combining political economic analysis,

guided interviews, and critical discourse analysis. The unique combination of approaches

allowed me to explore the economic, cultural, and subjective dynamics of telework in

order to reach the core of my research question, which asks if we may be mistaken in our

belief in the inevitability of remote work, and if so, what that means for the future of

telework. A multi-directional method is an effective way to arrive at reliable conclusion

about the evolving state of telework. This project is a response, in part, to the apparent

reconsideration of corporate enthusiasm for telework that is signaled by Marissa Mayer’s

telework ban. Though, as mentioned before, there are other companies that banned

telework at the same time, or had prohibitions on telework in place, before Mayer took
 6

over at Yahoo. Nonetheless, this project comes at a timely moment when a corporate shift

away from telework appears to be materializing.

The political economic analysis includes studies from trade journal publications,

industry research, and scholarly investigations, with the goal of understanding the

financial incentives that exist for companies that adopt telework arrangements, and

compare that to the employee savings, where they exist, in order to paint a complete

picture of the costs and benefits of telework. The critical discourse analysis focused on

news media stories surrounding Marissa Mayer’s decision to rescind telework privileges

at Yahoo. A flurry of stories appeared in the popular press that discussed the impact of

Mayer’s decision, including lengthy features in news magazines such as the Atlantic,

Forbes, and Slate, and US News and World Report. Mayer’s decision served as the

catalyst that generated novel discussions on telework and work/life balance in the

evolving technical and knowledge work environment. Likewise, using stories about

Mayer, who is a woman and a mother, helped me uncover the gender specific concerns

present in popular discourses on telework. Finally, I conducted guided interviews with

teleworkers from a variety of industries, which provided me with fresh data on how

teleworkers see their labor under both telework and traditional arrangements, how they

collaborate, and under which arrangement they felt they were best compensated. A more

detailed synopsis of the methodology for each chapter follows.

Political Economic Analysis

Political economic analysis posits that in order to understand a given

phenomenon, one must first consider “the formulas and conventions of production”

(Kellner, 2003, p. 12). For my analysis of telework, I drew upon a number of data
 7

sources, including scholarly journal pieces, governmental and Census data, popular press

articles that specifically discuss the economics of telework, and industry sponsored

research, to identify and unpack the “formulas and conventions of production” that are

making telework widely used, and also explore why it may cost more than it is worth.

One particularly important scholarly journal is Gender, Work, and Organization, which

has devoted considerable attention to the effects of telework on family arrangements.

Likewise, journals that focus on human resources, such as Advances in Developing

Human Resources, or information management journals like the European Journal of

Information Systems, have occasionally published articles that discuss the impact of

teleworking on families.

Other scholars, many of which write for business and trade publications report on

the cost savings to employees and employers under telework scenarios. These reports,

while unapologetically favorable to telework, provided some very useful data and

analyses. The Telework Research Network, the Conference Board of Canada, Jala

International, and Cisco Systems are very prolific in publishing research that seeks to

convince governments and employers to adopt telework arrangements. These

organizations often make use of Census data, or make available poll data, which contains

trends and shifts in telework that will be helpful in understanding how telework is being

implemented, and how affects families. The final source of material is popular press

articles about telework. These range from traditional mainstream news sources to the

many blogs and Internet sources that discuss telework regularly. For example, Cali

Ressler and Jody Thompson of Culture RX, the developers of the Results-Only Work

Environment, comment extensively on developments in telework on their webpage. They

 8

have also published two books: one on the reasons why they believe telework is better

than traditional work arrangements, and one on how to manage teleworking employees.

The business press, such as Fortune, Forbes, The Economist, and the Wall Street Journal

also carried stories and opinion pieces that discussed labor and economic trends.

Critical Discourse Analysis

To generate a sample of articles to study, I conducted a Lexis Nexus Academic

search of all news articles containing the words “Marissa Mayer,” that appeared between

January 1 and March 31 of 2013: the month of the telework ban, as well as the month

preceding and following it. I narrowed the sample down further by filtering the articles to

just those that were placed in the “Flexible Work Arrangements” content category. This

yielded 148 unique news stories in the US and international press. Stories either appeared

in news sections of the paper, and were assumed to provide a balanced approach, or

appeared in a commentary or editorial section, and were assumed to be more opinionated

and one-sided. Of the 148 total articles, seventy-six appeared in hard news sections of the

paper, and seventy-two appeared in commentary sections, such as op-ed or employment

columns. In a few cases, there were articles that were overtly supportive or critical of

Mayer’s ban, but they appeared in the objective, hard news sections nonetheless, and so

they are counted amongst the opinion pieces. These anomalies appeared mostly in highly

opinionated, soft news publications such as the New York Daily News or USA Today.

The methodology I employed to examine the news articles is a critical discourse

analysis, using an inductive data investigation method described by David Thomas

(2006). The outcome of such an analysis, according to Thomas, is the “development of

categories into a model or framework that summarizes the raw data and conveys key
 9

themes and processes” (Thomas, 2006, p. 240). To build this framework, the researcher

begins with a close reading of the data until a familiarity with the content is established,

allowing the investigator to identify themes or categories in the raw data. Once these

broad categories are identified, the data is continuously reread and refined to ensure that

the themes are accurate and inclusive, and once no new categories emerge, then it is

assumed that all the major themes have been identified. (Thomas, 2006, p. 241-2;

Marshall, 1999, p. 419). Some of the features of established categories are thematic titles

that identify their significance, descriptions of the categories, text from the raw data that

is exemplary of the themes, links that are drawn between the categories and others in the

study, and finally a framework or model in which the categories are situated, which

explains the data as a whole (Thomas, 2006, p. 240).

In-depth Interviews

There is a lot to be learned from in-depth interviews with workers who have

experienced both telework and office work arrangements. In-depth interviews provided

insight into the effects telework had on their work/life balance, how their work was

managed and evaluated, whether they experienced isolation, and what they enjoyed about

teleworking. According to Roger D. Wimmer and Joseph R. Dominick, intensive

interviewing is best for gathering data that is rich in detail. The interviewee is given the

opportunity to produce long, well thought responses, and in turn the interviewer is free to

engage in follow-up questions that may arise from verbal and non-verbal responses

(Wimmer and Dominick, 2011, p. 139). There are some drawbacks to this

methodological approach, namely the inability to easily generalize the data and the

potential for reseacher bias to be introduced into the interview process. In spite of this, I
 10

believe that it still presents a fascinating opportunity to explore the advantages and

disadvantages for workers in telework operations.

In order to attract potential teleworkers to be interviewed, an ad was placed on

various social media sites such as Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter, asking for volunteers

(See Recruitment Advertisement). Fourteen people responded in total, all of whom were

interviewed. The interview questions encompassed four broad categories, each of which

corresponded generally to one of the four chapters of the dissertation project. The first

category was comprised of general questions, which were designed to establish their

knowledge of telework, how they came to be employed in their arrangement, and how

they structured their days. The second category was comprised of family related

questions, which focused on how telework influenced their interaction with their families.

For example, if they have children, how do the children feel about the work arrangement?

The third category was comprised of financial questions. These sought clarification on

how much money they may have saved in travel costs, or how much money they may

have lost in personal costs (extra food, utilities, leisure, etc.,) and if economic or

ecological concerns influenced their decision to telework. The final category was

technology questions, which attempted to better understand the ways in which employers

use software to monitor teleworkers, or expect employees to be ‘available’ twenty-four

hours a day via smartphones (See Interview Questions).

Chapter Outline

The chapter that follows is an extensive review of the literature on telework.

There has been no shortage of scholarly interest in telework since its origins in the 1970s,

and so any researcher of telework has to find an effective way to account for the vast
 11

body of work. The method I employ is a conceptual review, using six categories defined

by Nicole B. Ellison: definition and scope of telework, management of teleworkers,

travel related impacts, organizational culture and teleworker isolation, boundaries

between work and home, and impact of telework on the worker and the family

(Ellison,1999, p. 339). Using these categories, I am then able to identify the gaps and

unanswered questions in the literature within which to situate my project.

The third chapter is a political economic analysis of telework, broken down into

three interrelated subsections. First, I explored the ways in which telework has the

potential to save a company money; second, I examined the costs and benefits to

employees in a telework arrangement; a third sections details the costs for a company that

offers teleworking. A number of private organizations, such as the Telework Research

Network, have a financial interest in spreading the popularity of telework. Many private

corporations and various governments were influenced by their research, which likely

played a role in their adoption of telework. This chapter unpacks the economic and

political advantages telework has for employers that use it, while also exploring the

political economic advantages and disadvantages it may have for the employees

themselves. This chapter also serves as an extended review of the literature on telework.

The fourth chapter is an analysis of popular press discourses surrounding Marissa

Mayer’s decision to end telework at Yahoo. Mayer faced both criticism and praise for

this decision, and the analysis of those discussions demonstrates how work/life balance is

evolving in the knowledge economy. Telework is a popular topic of discussion in the

news as of late, given that we are witnessing the convergence of a number of persistent

problems that appear to have a common solution in telework (global economic instability,
 12

work/life balance, global warming), but this analysis reveals that telework has the

potential to reproduce, or at least protect, existing power dynamics under capitalism.

The fourth chapter analyzes guided interviews that I conducted with current and

former teleworkers. I identify how workers feel about teleworking, how their lives have

changed through the arrangement, how they spend their work and leisure time, and

whether or not they feel it is an improvement over traditional work. Although research

has been conducted before (Huws, Korte, and Robinson, 1990; Huws, 1999; Sullivan and

Lewis 2001), I believe there are a number of reasons why this project is different. At the

present moment, telework is being implemented on a scale far larger than ever before;

more employees in an array of different sectors of work are now able to adopt telework,

however some of the largest companies of the new economy are openly unreceptive to

the idea of telework, and this chapter will seek to find out why this is the case. At this

historical moment, telework is being renegotiated and resisted in some sectors, which

means that there is an important opportunity to examine the struggle over remote work as

it is happening.

The final chapter is a conclusion chapter, in which I pull together the main points

of the three research chapters so that I can explain how they relate to one another, and to

the questions that guided this project. I also provide some final thoughts on how this

project makes contributions to important theoretical fields such as Autonomist Marxism

and domestic labor. Beyond that, I discuss the limitations of my research, as well as

avenues for future scholars of telework.

 13

A Review of the Literature on Telework

Telework was originally borne out of the ecological and economic crises of the

1970s, as the environmental implications of industrial capitalism had became

increasingly disturbing in that decade. The oil spill in Santa Barbara, California in 1969,

as well as the burning of the Cuyahoga River in Ohio as a result of pollution in the same

year, are both considered watershed moments in the birth of the environmental movement

that put ecological concerns forever on the minds of American citizens, and forced

industry, as well as local and national governments, to take steps to moderate pollution.

The US Congress passed the Federal Water Pollution Control Act of 1972, largely as a

result of these environmental catastrophes (Adler 2002, p. 91). Telework was one of the

methods floated at the time as a possible step to reducing US dependence on foreign oil,

for eliminating traffic congestion in large cities, and as means by which air pollutions

could be reduced over major metropolitan areas (Pyöriä, 2011, p. 388).

Ecological disasters were not the only contributors to a change in public

consciousness about commuting. Some scholars claim that the OPEC oil crisis of 1973

brought complacent Westerners out of their postwar stupor, forcing them to face the fact

that oil, and the lifestyle it facilitated, could not continue unabated. In an article published

shortly after the crisis, Charles Issawi argued that prior to the oil embargo, heavy

petroleum consuming countries had failed to explore other sources of energy because

they held the “belief that cheap oil was available, because of legitimate environmental

considerations, and because the Western world- and the United States, in particular-were

behaving like spoilt children in thinking that they could have unlimited amounts of

energy at no cost” (Issawi 1978, p. 11). In a nation dependent upon cars, the Fordist
 14

assembly line, and cheap oil, the sudden realization that energy could become very

expensive, or dry up completely, posed a serious threat to the social conditions that made

postwar American capitalism possible. From a broader perspective, David Harvey points

to the Arab-Israeli War of 1973, and the middle-east oil embargo that resulted, as a

pinnacle moment in the shift from the rigid Fordist-Keynesian economy of the postwar

years, to the flexible economy of the neoliberal post-Fordist era. Specifically, the oil

crisis “pushed all segments of the economy to seek out ways to economize on energy use

through technological and organizational change” (Harvey 1990, 145). What resulted, he

said, was the formation of a new labor regime characterized by flexibility in processes, in

markets, in products, and patterns of consumption. This new regime sought to diminish

the number of “core workers,” those working full time at permanent jobs with benefits,

in order to replace them with temporary or contract workers, those with limited skills,

who could be hired or fired depending on the labor needs at the moment (Harvey 1990).

In 1973, a physicist named Jack Nilles coined the terms “telework,” and

“telecommuting” while studying remote work at the University of Southern California’s

Center for Futures Research (Mears, 2007). He proposed that workers could travel to and

from their jobs by networked computers rather than in person, in order to save fuel during

the oil embargo. This had the added benefit of reducing pollution and curbing public

infrastructure costs for transportation. Nilles wrote several books and articles devoted to

increasing awareness of the practice, as well as providing strategies for managing

workers in remote labor environments (Nilles, 1998; Nilles, 1997; Nilles, 1994). He

discussed how telecommuting could reduce traffic congestion, and mitigates urban

sprawl (Nilles, 1988; Nilles, 1991). He distinguished telework from telecommuting.

 15

Telework he says, is “ANY form of substitution of information technologies (such as

telecommunications and computers) for work-related travel; moving the work to the

workers instead of moving the workers to work.” Telecommuting is “periodic work out

of the principal office, one or more days per week either at home, a client’s site, or in a

telework center” (Nilles 1998, p. 1). The latter appears as an intermediate step where full-

time telework might not yet be plausible or desirable. Throughout this project, however, I

use the terms telework and telecommute interchangeably because for my purposes,

Nilles' distinction is unimportant. Whether one works out of an office principally, or only

periodically, makes little difference in the overall arguments I offer. It is merely worth

noting what the creator of the terms had in mind when developing them.

Telecommuting still protects the centrality of a principal workspace while

allowing employers and employees to enjoy some of the benefits associated with remote

work. Nilles argues that since the industrial revolution, capital was required to centralize

its production operations near natural resources, workers, power, and supplies. But in the

post-Fordist era, this need not be the case due to the increase in jobs that require the

manipulation of information rather than objects. Decentralization of labor is possible,

and, he suggests, beneficial, because “information technology has developed to the point

where the necessary information can get to us no matter where or when we are” (Nilles

1998, p. 9-10). Nilles is largely responsible for creating the terminology by which remote

work is described, and his consulting company Jala International has allowed him to

remain one of telework’s most vocal advocates since the early 1970s.

By the 1980s, interest in and around telework had intensified, and futurologists

began making sweeping, grandiose predictions about the emancipatory potential of

 16

remote work. Alvin Toffler’s Third Wave was perhaps the most famous, which contained

lofty prognostications about a future teeming with ‘electronic cottages,’ where every

worker was wired to their job and to each other in their combination home/workplace

(Toffler, 1980). Norman Macrae argued that telecommuting would bring about the end of

the giant corporations, as nimble, dispersed workers created products using their home

computers—although the dirty labor of production would still exist, only in China and

India (Macrae, 1989). Although far ahead of his time, and not usually speaking

specifically about labor, Marshal McLuhan made similar predictions about the ability of

future technologies to extend our capacities for global interaction through

decentralization (McLuhan, 1962; McLuhan, 1964). Despite projections from Nilles and

these so-called futurologists about the inevitable growth of telework, or the prevalence of

the “global village,” by the 1980s mass conversion to remote work had still not

materialized (Felstead, 2012).

Definition, Measurement, and Scope of Telework

The literature on telework is quite extensive, covering a variety of topics, but a

number of questions remain. Nicole B. Ellison completed a detailed review of the

scholarly telework literature, organizing it into six groups: scope and measurement of

telework, management of teleworkers, travel related impacts of telework, organizational

culture and employee isolation, boundaries between home and work, and impact of

telework on the individual and the family (Ellison, 1999, p. 339). Ellison’s work is

incredibly helpful for categorizing the literature as a whole, as it provides a clean

conceptual framework into which scholarly discourses on telework can be situated.

Therefore, I will use the six subcategories of her model to explore the literature on
 17

telework, taking time at the end to explain the gaps that exist, and where my project seeks

to make a contribution within these categories. Before that, I present a brief history of

how the concept of telework was first developed.

Ellison observes that research on telework and telecommuting is fragmented,

“hindered primarily by the fact that practitioners, consultants, and scholars all subscribe

to different definitions of telework, telecommuting, mobile work, and so on” (Ellison,

2004, p. 17). Although some people have attempted to develop schematics that would

categorize different types of teleworkers, in the hopes of making scholarly and industry

studies of them easier, disagreements still persist (Friz, Higa, Narasimhan, 1995). These

disagreements are not simply a matter of semantics. The inability to agree on what

constitutes a teleworker, or how much remote work is enough to be considered a

teleworker, or if there is a noteworthy difference between a teleworker and a

telecommuter, makes it very nearly impossible for researchers to even determine how

many teleworkers there are due to the ambiguities these definitions introduce.

As technology evolves, office work and home work will continue to weave

together, further muddying one’s ability to distinguish between the two (Wilkes and

Billsberry, 2007) Ultimately, these authors argue that teleworkers cannot be considered a

homogenous group, and that studies ought to focus on those teleworkers who are

primarily working from home, what they call “home-anchored workers” (Wilkes and

Billsberry, 2007, p. 178). Having an accurate count of teleworkers would be convenient,

but the indistinct nature of the role of teleworker is what makes them such a compelling

research object. If we cannot expect to reasonably estimate how many teleworkers there

are, then we need to move beyond the flawed calculations and try to discover new ways
 18

to understand the impact telework may have on a business, and what influence

teleworking has on the worker.

Given the difficulties in accurately estimating the number of teleworkers at any

time, it is no surprise that scholars found that not only were predictions about telework’s

growth wildly overstated, but that the rhetoric about women using telework to combine

child care and paid employment was short-sighted (Brockelhurst, 1989; Christensen,

1987). As Huws points out, these forecasts about telework were unfounded, as telework

was mostly used by employers to create a flexible workforce of precarious, frequently

female laborers who could be hired and fired based on fluctuating production needs

(Huws, 2003, p. 97). As David Harvey argues, female workers were heavily exploited in

this transition to more flexible workforces. Harvey claims that the new labor market

structures make it “much easier to exploit the labor power of women on a part-time

basis,” because they can now be more easily substituted for highly paid and “less easily

laid-off core male workers” (Harvey 1990, p. 147-52). This is supported by an interesting

project that found that when a person with little autonomy in their job, for example

clerical or data entry work, began teleworking, they experienced a higher level of

supervision and less autonomy than before.

The opposite was also true, in that a person with a high level of workplace

autonomy could expect even more freedom if they began teleworking (Olson and Primps,

1984). Female teleworkers were increasingly casualized, as they became the staple

members of peripheral labor (Holti and Stern, 1986). This has obvious gendered

implications since women were mostly doing clerical work in the 1980s, and men were

more often professionals. As Diane-Gabrielle Tremblay points out, female teleworkers in

 19

this period were heavily concentrated in fields like “accounting, translation, word

processing, and secretarial work” (Tremblay, 2002, p. 165).

An extensive study by Shoshana Zuboff supports a number of these claims. In her

exploration of technology and office work, Zuboff found that many clerical positions

were becoming more and more automated, leaving the exclusively female work force she

studied feeling alienated, useless, and robotic (Zuboff, 1988). A great number of these

employees expressed feeling as though the knowledge of the job used to give it meaning,

and purpose, but changes in their work technology alienated them as emphasis was

transferred to speed, stamina, and rote memorization. As one employee explained, the

presence of her body was all that mattered now. More than one employee compared the

new job to that of a monkey hitting buttons (Zuboff, 1988, p. 135-6). Zuboff’s study

supports the notion that it is mostly women’s paid work that is likely to be displaced by

advances in technology. Women have a complex relationship to technology when

working for wages. Jobs in which women have been heavily concentrated, at least in the

past, or in which they were only recently allowed to enter, are the positions most likely to

be eliminated by changes in technology (Feldberg and Glen, 1983. p. 67). Feldberg and

Glenn wonder whether it is possible that women are, or have been in the past, used as a

“transitional labor force,” whereby women absorb the jobs once held by men, as

advances in technology transform those positions into low skill, repetitive, highly

rationalized jobs. This is a compelling suggestion, and one that is relevant to a study of

telework, for at the end of this transition period, those positions are eventually eliminated,

only after technology is able to maximize the reduction in labor power needed to

complete these tasks (Feldberg and Glenn, 1983, p. 70).

 20

Two problematic issues arise in this section of the literature. On the one hand,

there are ambiguities in defining what constitutes a teleworker. As such, understanding

the popularity, scope, and future of telework has been a guessing game fraught with

disagreements. Second, scholars have focused considerable attention on how telework

might help women experience more harmony between domestic and paid labor, but this

here too, scholars disagree on the overall impact. Defining the scope and impact of

telework requires more than an accounting of how many people are teleworking, or how

many can be expected to telework in the future: more qualitative methods must be used to

try to predict what the future of remote work might look like.

Management of Teleworkers

Proponents of telework have written prolifically about how to effectively

overcome the problems inherent to remote worker management. Cali Ressler and Jody

Thompson, the developers of the Results-Only Work Environment at Best Buy, wrote

two books on the subject: one describing the reasons why companies should adopt

telework programs (2010), and a second book devoted to managing remote workplaces

(2013). It has been argued that the benefits of telework, such as increases to productivity

and reduced worker stress, are dependent upon a management apparatus that understands

the unique needs of remote work forces (Nilles, 1998; Cascio, 2000). Scholars publishing

in management or workplace organizational fields have made similar arguments,

contending that telework is most successful when management creates the right

environment (Vega, 2000).

Management and oversight of teleworkers remains a controversial topic partially

because supervising teleworkers means finding new ways to measure their output. Some
 21

managers are uncomfortable with their inability to oversee and manage workers using the

traditional indices such as if they are on-time, dressed properly, and focused during work

time (Kawakami, 1983, p. 76). Managers and executives are fearful that they would

completely lose their ability to oversee the workflow process if too many employees are

teleworking (Duxbury, Higgins, and Irving, 1987, p. 278). Measuring output and results

over attendance, is much more time consuming and stressful for managers (Kinsmen,

1987; Huws, 1984). Baruch and Smith tackle the changing legal relationship for large-

scale telework operations, arguing that many homeworkers now face new challenges

unforeseen by managers and employers of the past. For example, telework reduces the

power of workers to organize unions, and limits the ability for governmental regulatory

agencies to monitor workplace health and safety standards (Baruch and Smith 2002, p.

63). These authors make it clear that telework presents a number of sites of potential

exploitation.

A persistent managerial anxiety is the belief that teleworkers are not actually

working as hard as they should be. A now infamous story from 2013 illustrates why it is

not an altogether paranoid position for managers to take. A software developer from the

United States was caught outsourcing his own job to a company in China, paying them

approximately one-fifth of his annual six-figure salary to do the work he was paid for. He

reportedly spent his workdays “surfing the web, watching cat videos on YouTube and

browsing Reddit and eBay” (BBC News, 2013). While anecdotal, it showed that without

direct supervision, a tech-savvy employee working from home could figure out clever

new ways to shirk responsibilities. This employee is probably more sophisticated than

most, but the prospect of “sunlighting” is a definite worry for many managers of
 22

teleworkers. Sunlighting is a term for someone who is found “holding two telecommuting

jobs simultaneously or telecommuting along with doing other work, such as telephone

answering or providing child day care” (Cross and Raizman, 1986, p. 84-5). The fear that

without visible supervision, employees will devise a plethora of new ways to avoid work

has been a major factor in the limited popularity of telework.

Measuring and managing teleworkers is a complicated problem for employers, as

the benefits of remote work arrangements depend on accurately calculating how

productive teleworkers can be. A claim that is often made by telework advocates, and is

supported by some scholarly research, is that telework increases the productivity of

workers (Armstrong-Stassen, 1998; Gemignani, 2000; Reese, 2000). But some have

argued that since these studies are based on surveys and self-identification methods, the

data is flawed (Bailey and Kurland, 2002, p. 389). Measuring productivity can come

down to whether a worker feels as though they are more or less productive, or claims to

be more productive while teleworking. In Huws’ surveys, teleworkers reported that

greater autonomy in how they structure their work was a main factor in why they choose

telework, even though this sometimes causes more difficulties for managers (Huws,

1984, p. 57). A telling sign is that telework has grown at a slower rate than predicted by

early advocates, part of the reason being that managers are resistant to the arrangement

because they are unable to measure and manage their workforce as effectively as they

could if they were located onsite (Gordon and Kelly, 1986).

Teleworking may play a role in whether or not an employee receives an

opportunity for advancement. According to Viviane Illegems and Alain Verbeke, “the

adoption of telework may negatively affect promotion possibilities, especially if the

 23

practice is perceived as creating a ‘new class’ of workers, ‘out of sight, and therefore out

of mind’” (Illegems and Verbeke, 2004). Professional experts have recommended that

workers limit their teleworking so as not to jeopardize their potential for workplace

growth (Ritterhaus, 1994; Wright, 1993).

One study proposed that in spite of concerns about reduced opportunity for

advancement while teleworking, professional stagnation is not a genuine concern

(McClosky and Igbaria, 2003, p. 31). The authors argued that because their sample

focused on professionals only, and did not homogenize diverse groups of teleworkers and

homeworkers, their conclusion was more reliable than those that found professional

immobility in telework environments. However, the failure to include non-professionals

risks glossing over the fact that they may be at a larger risk of limiting their advancement

opportunities by teleworking, while perhaps the risk is low or nonexistent for

professionals. This issue needs to be explored further because not only is it unclear

whether telework hinders opportunities for advancement, but if it does, it may also be

possible that workers who were already precariously employed unfairly experience

reduced opportunities for professional development as a result of their decision to

telework. Therefore, in my interviews with teleworkers, I include both professional and

non-professional workers in order to better capture the variety of telework experiences.

Travel Related Impacts of Telework

Telework has been discussed in terms of its impact on the environment, most of

which deals with travel, or general energy use. The repercussions of telework on the

environment at large are a direct result of workers no longer commuting to a centralized

workplace. Reducing carbon emissions, cutting energy costs, and saving on fuel are
 24

frequently cited affordances of telework. Joseph P. Fur and Stephen Pociask argue for

increased availability of broadband Internet services in the US in order to make possible

more telework opportunities, and thus reduce greenhouse gases (Fuhr and Pociask 2011).

They see the growth of high speed Internet as a site of opportunity for alleviating global

warming. There has been scholarship arguing that telework can cut energy use for offices

and commuters, benefiting both workers and employers (Kitou and Horvath 2008).

Commutes are a fairly unpopular activity, especially to and from work, so it is no

surprise that telework advocates would highlight the lost commute when extolling the

virtues of remote work. However, they often assume that when a commute is eliminated

or reduced, workers are going to stay at home, which is not necessarily the case (Wilson

and Greenhill, 2005). The overall environmental impact of increased teleworking and

reduced commutes is, by some estimates, incredibly modest. For example, if 50% of

eligible information workers in the United States began teleworking four days a week,

they would only reduce national energy use by 1%, when increasing the average fuel

efficiency of automobiles by 20% would lower national energy use by more than 5%

(Matthews and Williams, 2005). A study of teleworkers in the Netherlands found that

their homeworking occurred before they commuted to an office, or after they had

returned home in the evening, which meant that the commute was not reduced at all in

these cases (Rietveld, 2011, p. 148). Allowing flexibility in the times that they commuted

did help reduce traffic congestion, but it did nothing to curb overall vehicle emissions or

average annual energy use (Rietveld, 2011, p. 148).

Not everyone is convinced that increased telework will have a positive net effect

on the environment. Teleworking has been found to increase urban sprawl as people
 25

move further and further away from their jobs in urban centers (Rhee, 2009). Arpad

Horvath found that the environmental benefit “depends on the individual or collective

scenarios and modes of implementation” (Horvath, 2010). Telework may have a positive

impact on the environment, but there are myriad complex factors that determine if it is

going to be successful or not. According to Allenby and Richards, there are a number of

unanswered questions regarding the positive environmental impact of teleworking. These

authors cite the difficulty in accurately assessing these abstract and complex cost/benefit

arrangements, such as whether or not a teleworker uses as much energy at home while

working as they would commuting to an office, or whether or not a teleworker uses their

flexibility to add miles on their car running errands (Allenby and Richards, 1999). A

longitudinal study of survey data of teleworkers at AT&T was inconclusive in

determining if the remote program actually reduced energy use, citing self-identification

problems (Atkyns, Blazek, and Roitz, 2002). While authors can come up with estimates

and guesses regarding these issues, they usually stop short of drawing categorical,

definitive conclusions about the positive effects of teleworking (Allenby and Richards,

1999). It is ironic that teleworking was first developed as a response to ecological and

environmental issues in the 1970s, and yet whether or not it actually addresses the issues

that birthed it, is still unresolved.

Organizational Culture and Isolation

The impact that telework has on workplace organization is hotly debated.

Discussions around the deskilling of labor associated with increased use of technology

are complicated by the “flexible” nature of remote knowledge work, which provides

considerably more autonomy to workers than may have previously been the case. Crystal
 26

Fulton contends, “telework has the potential to change hierarchical structures and loosen

centralized control over workers” (Fulton 1996, p. 76). Centralized location control of

workers will be a mere trade-off for institutional, technological remote control over

workers, however. As Cyert and MacCrimmon argue, reliance on computers and remote

connectivity for work will increase the role of programmed options for workers, and

decrease discretionary power for them (1968, p. 598). In other words, direct supervision

will take the form of limited programmed options for workers. Greater workplace

autonomy may be a benefit, but it is likely to be accompanied by a rapid deskilling of

labor.

Teleworker isolation has been a consistent problem since the technology that

made remote work possible first arrived. In the 1980s, several scholars had published

articles explaining how early adopters were experiencing telework, and isolation was a

major concern. For example, Joanne H. Pratt found that many teleworkers reported

missing the social stimulation that comes from located work, and that this was especially

true for women with young children (Pratt, 1984, p. 6). Tom Forester, who wrote an early

criticism of Alvin Toffler’s theory of “electronic cottages,” argued that proponents of

telework were failing to take seriously the psychological threat posed by teleworker

isolation, and that most advocates were likely never required to telework themselves and

thus never experienced the loneliness of remote work first-hand (Forester, 1988, p. 232).

Kuglemass found that isolation was primarily found only in workers who were full-time

teleworkers, but was not an issue for part-time workers (Kuglemass, 1995). Nonetheless,

workers who do not spend time in the office recorded feeling out of the social loop

(Baruch & Nicholson, 1997; Vega & Brennan, 2000; Reinsch, 1997). Because they are at
 27

home, teleworkers often record being politically detached from the decisions that

determine how their work is done, which is less of a problem for office located workers

(Fulton, 1996, p. 78). This is not a universal feeling, of course, as some workers record

being able to maintain a social connection to the workplace even though they do not

spend time in a physical work location (Diekema, 1992; Duxbury & Neufeld, 1999).

Although the problem of loneliness and isolation associated with telework is well

documented, very few studies have attempted a Marxist critique of this issue. Anita

Greenhill and Melanie Wilson explore this problem, and offer a compelling Marxist-

Feminist critique of telework, but they ultimately argue that the home offers a refuge

from the alienation of compulsory waged labor, and so permitting telework, especially for

women, destroys that haven (Greenhill and Wilson, 2005). As true as that is, this

argument relies on a rather problematic liberal-feminist assumption that telework should

be resisted because the alienation of waged labor that comes from working outside the

home is automatically superior to the alienation of waged labor within the home, as the

former is at least happening within the public sphere (Greenhill and Wilson, 2005. p.

169).

The authors rely on a traditional Marxist assertion that “incorporation into social

production is a precondition” for women’s liberation (Greenhill and Wilson, 2005. p.

162). Socialist-feminists from the Autonomist tradition have challenged that assertion,

saying that incorporation into social production simply opens up new avenues for

gendered exploitation (James and Dalla Costa, 1972; Fortunati, 1989). Arguing that

women can achieve liberation by going into the waged labor sphere, outside the home, is

akin to trading “slavery to the kitchen sink,” for “slavery to the assembly line and the
 28

kitchen sink” (James and Dalla Costa, 1972). In other words, waged labor is not

emancipatory. This project extends the Autonomist critique by looking at the ways in

which telework exacerbates already existing gender labor issues.

Telework and isolation remains an unresolved issue in the literature on telework.

The lack of social interaction between coworkers that comes with telework has been

linked to higher levels of feelings of isolation (Kurland and Cooper, 2002). In a series of

interviews with teleworkers, some scholars found that homeworkers do not always feel

isolated, and sometimes actually recorded a high level of enjoyment because they could

limit their interactions with coworkers to when they wanted to (Crossan and Burton,

1993). The nature of teleworker isolation remains unresolved, as some studies have

concluded that workers enjoy the freedom that comes from limited disruptions while

teleworking, while others maintain that workers relish the social dynamics of working in

the office. This project will seek to bridge these arguments by assuming first that these

arguments are not mutually exclusive, and second, that a more nuanced balance between

telework and office work may actually offer workers their best opportunity for social

fulfillment.

Boundaries Between Home and Work

Scholars have argued that telework blurs the boundaries between work and home.

One of the problems that continually emerges in telework environments is the potential

for overwork as a result of this lack of structure. Teleworkers who have families,

especially women, find that they have to work around the schedules of family members,

which can mean daily overwork (Gurstein, 2001, p. 40). Teleworkers have a difficult

time setting and maintaining the boundary between work and family, which means that
 29

both families and employers develop an expectation of constant availability (Kossack et

al, 2009, p. 165). Scholars from the US Department of Labor found in 2012 that

teleworkers put in an average of six hours of work per week more than office workers

(Noonan and Glass, 2012). Some scholars have argued that overwork is less of a problem

than it appears, as teleworkers are able to put in more hours than their non-teleworking

counterparts before they begin to experience any negative effects on work/life balance

(Hill, Hawkins, Ferris, and Weitzmen, 2001). While others have argued that telework is

best option we may have available for reducing the tensions between work and family life

(Pratt, 1999; Duxbury et al, 1998). Nonetheless, there is a desperate need to conduct an

updated study that looks at how the boundary between family and work is shaped under

telework. Studies from the 1980s and 1990s often reported the opinions of people who

were just being given the opportunity to telework, and workers with unabashed

enthusiasm for remote work environments has likely changed since then (Duxbury et al,

1998; Haddon and Silverstone, 1993).

Penny Gurstein published a book on telework called Wired to the World, Chained

to the Home: Telework in Daily Life, which is a fantastic primer for my own research, as

she explores the issues that arise when the boundaries between work and home are

eroded. But her book also opens the door to many more unresolved issues. For example,

she argues that the claim that telework is a panacea for resolving longstanding workplace

tensions between home and work is a myth, however her research does not explore from

where this mythology originates, how it is perpetuated, and who benefits from it

(Gurstein, 2001, p. 194). Another important contribution Gurstein makes is outlining how

telework transforms the space of the home and the community in unique ways. She
 30

contends that our “public world becomes more remote and impersonal,” resulting in our

public spaces becoming “anonymous, fearful places” (Gurstein, 2001, p. 190).

Conversely, our attachment to our home/workplaces will reinforce a “tendency toward

narcissistic autonomy” (Gurstein, 2001, p. 190). While I do not disagree with her

conclusion, it raises the question of what the impact is of this tendency on the subjectivity

of teleworkers.

In other words, how do teleworkers describe the feeling of living under conditions

in which the boundaries between work and home are increasingly fuzzy? One of

Gurstein’s concluding remarks is that it is unlikely that “formal telework programs will

become a widespread phenomenon,” a conclusion she bases on the unwillingness of

corporations to jeopardize the hierarchical, face-to-face supervisory methods that are

most comfortable for managers (Gurstein, 2001, p, 201). Again, I agree with her

conclusion, but not with the justification. Certainly there is reason to believe that

telework will never become widespread, and that supervisory discomfort may play a role

in that decision, but the fact that some companies are moving back and forth between

telework and traditional arrangements suggests that a reluctance to challenge corporate

culture is an unsatisfactory explanation. My research suggests that there is more than just

management culture at play in corporate decisions to limit telework.

Another way in which the boundary between work and home is fading is through

technological surveillance mechanisms, which are taking on new intensity in telework

environments. According to Ben Fairweather, “technological methods can allow

managers to monitor the actions of teleworkers as closely as they could monitor ‘on site’

workers, and in more detail than the same managers could traditionally” (Fairweather,
 31

1999, p. 39). This increased ability to monitor workers has been linked to lowered worker

morale (Fairweather, 1999, p. 39). A study of Italian call-center teleworkers found that

technological surveillance introduced far more problems than it solved. For one, it

introduced a “panoptic effect,” whereby workers knew that they were constantly being

monitored and so acted in superficial ways to avoid provocation by management

(Valsecchi, 2006). Technological monitoring produces employees who act in such a way

that they maintain the status quo, but also, according to Bain and Taylor, teleworkers

devise new ways to resist detection altogether (Bain and Taylor, 2000). The literature is

silent though on the psychological effects of having the home turned into a space of

surveillance, a question my project addresses.

Impact of Telework on the Individual and the Family

Scholars have long debated the potential for remote work to address feminist

concerns about women’s underrepresentation in the paid work force. Since the 1980s,

there has been no shortage of utopian predictions about how telework would restore the

centrality of the traditional nuclear family by allowing women to be home with their

children and hold down jobs if they wanted to (Huws, 1991). But these lofty

prognostications were universally panned. For example, a review of US Census data

found that those who worked at home were comprised of people who had difficulty

maintaining employment outside the home due to domestic needs, which usually meant

mothers, the elderly, or disabled; however, because this group earned less than non-

teleworkers, they also did not rely on this income to sustain themselves (Kraut, 1987).

This is consistent with what Kathleen Christensen found, which was that female

teleworkers were almost always part of a two-parent household, and worked to gain extra
 32

income and enjoy the satisfaction that comes with contributing as a laborer (Christensen,

1987).

The role of women in the workforce would continue to play a significant role in

academic discussions of telework throughout the 1990s and 2000s as well, and much of

the focus remained on probing the assumptions that telework allowed women to better

manage work and family. The 1980s were characterized by a focus on female

teleworker’s casual, precarious status, while in the 1990s and 2000s, the focus shifted to

the conflicts between their professionalization and domestic labor needs. As

responsibility for attending to domestic labor continued to reside with women, some

scholars suggested that telework was unevenly beneficial to men over women, and this is

the result of the boundary between work and family becoming more permeable in

telework scenarios, where each sphere significantly influences how life is experienced in

the other. Telework has the potential to increase what they termed work/family transition

periods (Hill, Hawkins, and Miller, 1996, p. 299). Traditional work arrangements see two

work/family transition periods a day: one in the morning when workers leave home for

their jobs, and one in the evening when they return. Under telework arrangements, there

can be several of these per day at unpredictable times, which can lead workers, especially

those responsible for domestic labor, to perceive their lives as hectically out of control,

unstructured, and chaotic (Hill et al 1996, p. 299). Men in one study were found to use

the time saved by teleworking for leisure activities or other paid projects (Kay, 1998, p.

435-54).

The impact of teleworking on men is a different issue altogether. According to a

study by Kiran Mirchandani (1999), the difference between male and female teleworkers
 33

and their ability to work from home is a matter of self-control. For men, interacting with

family is a ‘temptation,’ but for women it is a responsibility. Men view the family as an

impediment to getting work done, an enticement that must be carefully mitigated if they

are to be productive. Women see the family as an essential part of their daily labor

responsibilities, meaning the boundary between paid work and domestic work has to

remain permeable if either is to be completed (Mirchandani 1999, p. 98). Therefore, in

order for women to experience the benefits of telework, they would have to work on the

same terms as men, essentially limiting their role as domestic caretakers.

One of the major effects of telework on individuals is physical, but scholars

disagree on whether the impact is positive or negative. Teleworkers are often more

sedentary than office workers because they do not have to physically move around an

office, and when they are under stress to finish work, physical activities are the first thing

to go (Gurstein, 2001, p. 70). Teleworkers often have irregular sleep, grooming, and

eating schedules, which can lead to health problems arising from sedentary lifestyles and

poor diets, such as weight gain, stress disorders, and migraines (Gurstein, 2001, p. 70).

Although, other studies have found that when employees are given flexible work

opportunities, they are more likely to participate in healthier behaviors (Grzywacz,

Casey, and Jones, 2007, p. 1308).

Scholars are also divided on whether there is a positive or negative benefit to

teleworkers’ emotional well-being. It can be less stressful for workers to avoid office

politics, and for their commutes to be limited or eliminated (Gregg, 2011). They can

better attend to domestic tasks, which can also relieve stress (Donnelly, 2006). The

feeling of being autonomous and the joy that comes from feeling personally responsible
 34

for productivity and workplace successes are also some of the oft cited benefits of

telework (Cross and Raizman, 1986, p. 12). However, a study by Sandi Mann and Lynn

Holdsworth found that teleworkers experience not only more feelings of isolation, but

also guilt, worry, frustration, and resentment on a level that exceeded that of their office

counterparts (Mann and Holdsworth, 2003; Mann et al, 2000). Overall, the argument that

workplace flexibility leads to an increase in one’s quality of life is subjective and

tenuous, and needs to be challenged (Vittersø et al, 2003).

Gaps in the Research and Avenues to Explore

The wide body of literature on telework covers a variety of important topics.

Conceptually, all of the literature fits within the above six categories: Scope of telework,

management of teleworkers, environmental and travel impacts, organizational culture and

isolation, boundaries between work and home, and finally the impact of telework on

individuals and their families. But within each of the categories, there remain unresolved

questions. In this section, I will detail the major spaces that emerged in the literature, into

which I hope my research can make a contribution. The first hurdle for any research

project on telework, the most persistent, nagging problem, is defining teleworkers, or at

least figuring out a useful way to distinguish them from non-teleworkers. For so much of

the current research, the drive to define teleworkers is motivated by the pragmatic need to

be able to count them. That is not my purpose. Instead my goal is to produce a definition

that is fluid enough to capture the shifting, and often-conflicting characteristics of

teleworkers so that I may be able to offer a critique of flexible work as a whole. To that

end, I contend we should think about telework as simply a method of organizing the labor

process. The Henry Ford assembly line is one method; the centralized office of the late
 35

twentieth century is another, at least for organizing the rote white-collar labor of the

period. Telework is yet another method of determining how a particular subset of

intellectual labor is organized.

A key distinction that has to be made is between a teleworker and outsourced

labor. In the 1980s and 1990s, it would have been common for corporations in the

industrialized nations to purchase products produced in the global south: India, China,

and Mexico or South America broadly. This has long been a standard trade practice, and

was considered "outsourcing". At this point though, it has become commonplace for

companies to purchase services as well, not just physical products. According to many

economists, including those of the World Trade Organization, outsourcing is typically

defined as the trade in services in which the buyer and supplier remain in their respective

locations (Bhagwati, Panagariya, and Srinivasan, 2004, p. 95-6). If we subscribe to this

definition, then it would be safe to assume that teleworkers have to be legally employable

in the country where the employer is located. As such, outsourced labor is not the same as

telework, although both play an important role in how labor in the Post-Fordist work

environment is organized. I have opted to exclude this group of workers from my project,

although their importance to the subject matter is incredibly important, their impact is far

beyond what can be attended to here.

Another of the primary issues in the literature that I will address is the question of

how teleworkers are managed. Specifically I want to understand whether or not

teleworkers hurt their chances of advancement within a company by opting to telework.

As it stands, the literature identifies a contradiction, in that professional and non-

professional employees may be subject to different risks on this point, but there is no
 36

attempt to reconcile it. By interviewing both professional and non-professional

teleworkers, I will be able to provide some insight into this inconsistency.

The transformative impact of telework, and its predicted growth, are two often

exaggerated components of telework. Scholars have claimed that telework is a solution

for all manner of workplace issues, but no studies as of yet have examined the growing

trend amongst tech companies to reject telework in favor of traditional office

arrangements, as Yahoo and Best Buy have recently done (Belkin, 2013; Bhasin, 2013).

The predictions about the inevitable growth of telework are inflated and grandiose, and

even the studies that arrive at this conclusion fail to address why this is so. The scholarly

arguments about whether or not productivity increases under telework misses an

important point, which is that perhaps productivity is a secondary concern to something

else, for example creativity and innovation. My project has at its core an inquiry into the

shift away from telework, which is explored in each of the three subsequent chapters, but

especially in the chapter that uses political economy to examine telework’s inconsistent

popularity.

Another problem that emerged in the literature on telework revolves around the

ways in which the gendered impacts of remote work have been continually

misunderstood. Scholarship has focused on the uneven effects of telework on men and

women, or the ways in which they experience telework differently, or the varying reasons

they have chosen telework, for example family and childcare responsibilities. While these

contributions are definitely valuable, none of the research takes into account the shifting

discourses on women and work more broadly. My project seeks to ground the telework

debate within the contemporary context of neoliberal corporate-sponsored feminism, the

 37

type championed by successful female executives like Sheryl Sandberg, which has

female agency, corporate success, and equal access to capital at the core of its ideology.

The connection between work, family, and women is evolving constantly, and so making

sense of the politics of this relationship is vital. Offering a critique of telework that

assumes the potential alienation of both waged and non-waged labor, especially for

women, is an absolute necessity for understanding the current post-Fordist knowledge

economy.

The biggest gap in the research is the dearth of studies that specifically address

the construction and circulation of discourses on remote work in the popular press. How

citizens make sense of an event is largely influenced by how that event is discussed in the

news media. Remote work has remained a popular topic of discussion in news media

texts, but so far there have been no studies that critically analyze these discourses. As a

result, we are missing a critical piece of the puzzle on the scope of telework. The key to

understanding how we arrived at our current opinion about the future of remote work can

be answered through a critical discourse analysis of telework. The chapter that researches

the coverage of Marissa Mayer’s Yahoo telework ban provides insight into how and why

these discourses continue to circulate.

 38

Hardly the Panacea: Unpacking the Costs and Benefits of

Telework

There has been a very public debate about the costs and benefits of telework.

Employers have struggled to strike a balance between having an in situ workforce and

flexible teleworkers, as both are needed in the post-Fordist workplace. Both have their

benefits: offering telework options to employees can help retain quality workers, as it

allows employees the flexibility to attend to childcare needs and leisure activities, making

for happier workers (Grzywacz, Casey, and Jones, 2007, p. 1308). Companies can also

cut down on overhead costs for electricity, heat, building maintenance, grounds upkeep,

and the like, by shifting workers to remote locations, where office space may be cheaper,

or by allowing them to work in their own homes (Kitou and Horvath 2008). According to

Jeffrey Hill and his colleagues, “one of the major benefits of mobile telework might be a

greater flexibility to manage household chores and child care” (Hill et al, 1996, p. 298).

On paper, it can often seem like a win-win for both workers and employers. However,

that is not the whole story.

Some authors conclude that telework is likely to blur the boundaries between

work and home, leading to increased frequency of “work/family transition periods,”

which are moments when a parent is leaving for work, or coming from work (Hill et al,

1996, p. 298). These can often be very stressful periods of time, and so to increase the

amount of work/family transition periods per day can lead to a subsequent intensification

in feelings of anxiety, or the perception of being “out of control.” Much of the discourse

on telework is occupied by stories of employee overwork and reduced worker

 39

collaboration, we should not be surprised to see its popularity wavering in some circles,

or slow to catch on altogether (Noonan and Glass, 2012; Mann and Holdsworth, 2003;

Gurstein, 2001).

A March 7th, 2014 article in the New York Times entitled “It’s Unclearly Defined,

But Telecommuting is Fast on the Rise,” perfectly captures this ambiguous state of

telework at the current historical moment. The title is misleading because the actual

content of the article demonstrates that determining the future of telework is just as

difficult as defining what a teleworker is. The author Alina Tugend cites several scholarly

studies, many of which argue that telework is increasing year by year—a 79% increase

between 2005 and 2012 by one estimate—or that contrary to prevailing assumptions

about teleworkers being stay-at-home mothers, teleworkers are actually comprised of

women and men, young and old, parents and single people (Tugend, 2014). Tugend then

conveys some of the problems with telework, bringing in research that demonstrates how

it makes interpersonal communication more difficult, can lead to overwork, and hurts

employee’s chances of promotions (Tugend, 2014). Ultimately, the article concludes that

it is hard to pin down to what degree telework is increasing, if at all, and ends by

reminding us that there is no consensus on just how much teleworking is too much.

This article makes the same mistake that much of the scholarly literature on

telework does, which is that it attempts to conclude definitively that telework is either

going to grow or destined to fail, is always good or always bad. This is an impossible task

though, as the first step of defining teleworkers, let alone counting how many exist, is a

futile effort. According to Global Workplace Analytics, a pro-telework consulting and

research agency, the politics of defining and counting telecommuters is a struggle:

 40

“Studying the work-at-home population is a little like trying to study meteoroids. We

know there are a lot of them and we know they’re important, but we don’t know where

they all are and not everyone agrees on which ones to count” (Global Workplace

Analytics).

Studying teleworkers has been called a “methodological nightmare,” as the

difficulties in “assessing both the quantity and quality of telework are compounded by

problems of definition” (Haddon and Silverstone, 1993, p. 7). Depending on how one

defines it, teleworkers can be full-time home based workers, or people who use their

smartphone on the weekend to answer work emails after spending forty or more hours in

the office during the week. Forbes publishes a list of 100 companies that allow

telecommuting, and it contains many well-known corporations such as Xerox, Dell, IBM,

American Express, Amazon, and Microsoft (Shin, 2015). Looking at the major

companies that have telework programs can give us some sense of the extent of telework

in large industries, but it fails to account for all of the small companies that have remote-

work programs, or individuals who have autonomous flexible arrangements at their

workplace.

Therefore, attempting to understand the scope and impact of telework by looking

at how many teleworkers exist, and where they work, is not practical, ultimately

misguided, and does nothing to illuminate the conditions under which telework is

deployed. Instead, we need ask, is telework introduced into a workplace to the benefit of

capital or labor—or both, or neither? If we want to understand why telework’s capacity

and growth is uncertain, then we need to explore the factors that contribute to telework’s

deployment in the workplace, and who benefits from the programs. We can learn more by
 41

examining why telework is used, or not used, than we can by trying to quantify

teleworkers, or devise a perfect set of definitions. A political economy analysis is the best

method to address these questions because they concern the production, circulation, and

distribution of products, as well as explore the interplay between profit motives and the

organization and management of labor.

In this chapter, I will analyze the costs and benefits of telework policies to better

understand the political economic justification for employers to support or reject

telework, and also explore how teleworking impacts the workers financially. I address

these questions in three parts. First, I look at the ways companies stand to save money by

instituting telework policies for their employees, or a subsection of their employees. The

second section examines telework from the employee perspective, particularly how and

to what degree teleworking affects workers in positive and negative ways. In the third

section, I explore the circumstances companies have encountered which cause them to

reject telework policies in favor of more traditional location based arrangements.

Following that, I tie these three strands together in a concluding analysis.

Savings for Companies

Since it was first introduced, telework has been floated as a panacea for all

manner of workplace problems. The most often cited benefit is that it will save employers

money. The Telework Research Network estimated in 2011 that if Canada’s 4.3 million

workers with compatible jobs were to begin teleworking, it would result in a collective

savings of $53 billion dollars per year. An employer that has 250 telecommuting workers

would realize a $3 million dollar per year savings-- a $10,000 per year savings for every

worker that telecommutes two days a week (Lister and Harnish, 2011). In a floundering,
 42

post-recession economy, this type of cost reduction could keep a company’s profits

healthy. There are myriad ways telework is purported to cut costs, and while many

calculations are based on complex and imperfect economic models, workplace savings

generally fit within two categories: direct and indirect cost savings.

Direct costs savings appear when an employer can easily identify exactly how

much money was saved by instituting a telework policy, and precisely from where the

savings originated. An example of a direct cost savings would be the sale of an office

space. Building sales generate a specific price upon selling, and all the secondary costs

like heating, electricity, and taxes, can be easily calculated. An indirect cost savings is

usually based on estimates, assumptions, and trends. The savings are not always

immediately realized, nor are they a fixed cost. An example would be worker satisfaction.

Happy workers are believed to be more productive, but increased productivity may take

time to translate into cost savings, and it is difficult to predict what type of savings will

be realized. The effects of indirect cost savings are latent. Let us first look at direct

savings.

Large companies are able to significantly reduce their real estate and energy costs

by housing fewer employees on site. Computer manufacturer IBM converted much of its

workforce to telework in the 1990s, and sold all the vacated real estate for $1.9 billion.

They continue to enjoy a $100 million dollar annual savings on the space, some of which

they lease out to other companies. The reduced cost in energy alone, for IBM, is $22.9

million dollars a year (Caldow, 2009, p. 9). In 1997, Pacific Bell instituted a telework

policy for its sales department, as well as its internal auditing, programming, finance, and
 43

marketing operations, which saved them $30 million dollars in real estate costs over six

years (Johnson, 1997, p. 61).

Sun Microsystems has a telework policy that allows more than half of its

employees to work from home, with employee reimbursements for heating and Internet

use. They record $68 million dollars a year in avoided real estate costs, and $3 million

dollars a year in energy savings, as it is cheaper for them to give teleworking employees

an energy allowance over paying energy costs for an entire building of workers (Lister,

2010, p. 7). Clearly, one of the major costs for any employer, especially one with a large

employee base, is the real estate. Eliminating this cost is perhaps the single biggest

incentive for any company looking to keep their books in the black. Aside from the real

estate and energy savings, there is potential to save even more when you consider the

costs of building maintenance, janitorial upkeep, and the like.

Sun Microsystems avoided a staggering $25 million a year in IT costs when it

instituted a telework policy (Lister, 2010, p. 7). A savings of this magnitude makes sense

considering how much money is spent building and maintaining the technological

infrastructure of the mass office. IT departments are made redundant when a company

moves to a cloud based computing system, which are generally more effective in

supporting teleworkers. According to Vincent Mosco, cloud computing is based on the

premise that the architecture and data required for computing can be located on a remote

server to which people can connect from their various devices and locations (Mosco,

2014, p. 16). Third party cloud companies concentrate and automate IT labor, allowing

them to offer the advanced IT services needed for telework at a much reduced cost, thus

encouraging companies to save money by outsourcing their IT work. Teleworkers are

 44

reliant upon the cloud to perform their work from home, which means that where we find

telework and cloud computing, the elimination of IT departments is sure to follow. This

trend, according to Mosco, is already starting to play out. HSBC revealed a major

reduction in its IT department in 2013, citing the “growing ability to outsource to the

cloud” (Mosco, 2014, p. 164). Cisco, which is a major proponent of telework as they

provide hardware, software, infrastructure and consulting related to remote work, made a

similar claim when they laid off 4,000 IT workers the same year (Mosco, 2014, p. 165).

The indirect costs are much more difficult to quantify; nonetheless they are

considered to be substantial enough that many employers cite these reasons among the

main contributors to why they institute telework policies. One of the ways that telework

can cut costs for an employer is by reducing worker absenteeism. According to one study,

unscheduled absences cost employers almost $2,000 a year per employee, which is

around $300 billion a year for US companies (Lister and Harnish, 2011, p. 12). Workers

have to take time off in order to care for sick children, go to appointments, and attend to a

variety of tasks and errands that simply cannot be done outside of business hours.

When absences cannot be avoided, and if the employee does not have a flexible

work arrangement, they have little choice but to call in sick. However, telework allows

employees to attend to their own needs while fitting in waged labor wherever they can

during the day. Therefore, productivity for any one employee is never really lost; it is

merely shifted to a more convenient time. Companies also record a noticeable reduction

in worker attrition. Allowing employees the ability to work from home has been linked to

increased job satisfaction, which leads to greater retention of talent, and avoids the costs

associated with searching for, hiring, and training new employees. Cisco Systems
 45

estimates that its telework program had resulted in 560 fewer voluntary terminations in

2012 than in previous years, a $75 million dollar savings (Everson, 2010).

A significant portion of the literature on telework contends that employees that

are allowed to work from home are far more productive than their counterparts in the

office setting (Armstrong-Stassen, 1998; Gemignani, 2000; Reese, 2000). This sentiment

is taken as gospel by industry advocates especially, who often invoke the self-evidentiary

nature of the telework/productivity relationship when discussing the merits. Cali Ressler

and Jody Thompson, the creators of the Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE) argue

that everyone who works under their signature telework arrangement becomes a

“innovate thinker” as soon as they realize that getting work done faster or more

efficiently means more free time for themselves (Ressler and Thompson, 2008, p. 131).

The Conference Board, a non-profit lobbying and pro-business research group published

an article on telework in which they contend that teleworkers have fewer distractions, and

have “less involvement in office politics, which results in less stress,” and more efficient

work (Abel and Levanon. 2011, p. 6).

For the practitioner press, the jury is in and telework is a surefire way to get more

work out of your employees. But for the scholarly press, the picture is more nuanced. It

certainly is possible that having fewer interruptions may increase productivity, but it is

not a certainty. As much of the research on telework demonstrates, reports of increased

productivity originate from surveys and interviews of people who opt to work from

home, making this a very problematic sample (Bailey and Kurland, 2002, p. 389).

Montreuil and Lippel go so far as to suggest that the desire to prove to managers and

bosses that telework “works,” may in fact be pushing employees to voluntarily increase
 46

either the hours or intensity of their labor (Montreuil and Lippel, 2003, p. 343). In this

latter case, increases to productivity may be short-lived, or completely fabricated. A

study of home-located teleworkers at an Italian call-center in 2006 found that the

precariousness of the teleworker was often used to prompt more productive labor from

the worker: managers would threaten to revoke telework privileges if worker productivity

showed any signs of diminishing (Valsecchi, 2006, p. 129). It is unclear, then, whether

telework actually increases a worker’s productivity, or if working from home simply

encourages people to temporarily increase their productivity- or even merely make the

claim that they are working harder to avoid having to work in an office. This is perhaps

why indirect cost savings are so unreliable. It is true that low productivity may be costing

an employer money, but there is no guarantee that telework will actually do anything to

solve that problem because it fails to address the root causes of low worker

productivity—a point we will return to later.

The potential to save money by converting one’s workforce to telework is an

attractive prospect for many companies. Shedding expensive and unnecessary property,

and avoiding all the energy, taxes, and fees that come with, is perhaps the single biggest

incentive and largest direct savings. As more and more businesses take advantage of the

availability of cloud computing, corporations will replace expensive IT staff and

technology with outsourced services. Direct costs such as these are hard to argue with.

They are predictable and quantifiable. Indirect costs are a bit more contentious. One

company may have a serious problem with absenteeism, stemming from any combination

of factors (both workplace and home), while another company of similar size and

industry may have no real problem with absent workers. In this case, instituting a
 47

telework policy may not help solve the problem if absenteeism stems from an

overbearing manager, for example: telework will likely exacerbate this problem. That

being said, in general an increasing number of companies are willing to shoulder the risk

in order to take advantage of the potential benefits.

Costs to Workers

Identifying how best to address workplace safety when the home is the workplace

is a major hurdle for companies keen on increasing telework. Standards of workplace

safety vary widely between countries and even different localities, which presents an

entirely new set of challenges to worker safety, especially when the workforce is widely

distributed. The United States government attempted a number of departmental telework

pilot programs in the 1980s to determine the viability of the arrangement, but the

programs were scrapped when auditors determined that workers would be eligible to

collect Worker’s Compensation if they were injured at home, and thus this presented too

big of a risk of fraud because officials reasoned that determining the validity of a claim

was near impossible (Smith, Carayon, Sanders, Lim, and LeGrande, 1992).

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration in the United States rendered

a decision in the late 1990s stating that all employers would be responsible for the health

and safety of remote workers. This verdict was met with a firestorm of protest from

business leaders and politicians alike, who claimed that such a move would be financially

burdensome to employers, would be impossible to implement, and could allow for

unreasonable and unconstitutional inspections into worker’s homes. It also did not

address the Worker’s Compensation issue the government ran into a decade earlier.

OSHA withdrew the ruling; however that did not stop a flurry of Republican politicians
 48

from working to pass laws codifying their own powerlessness to oversee home offices

into official policy (Kelli L. Dutrow, 2001). A fear of fraudulent insurance claims, and

general ambiguity about responsibility for protecting remote workers, appears to be one

of the leading fears inhibiting US promotion of telework.

The Canadian government has taken a similar approach. As of May 26, 2014, the

Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety said on its website (www.ccohs.ca)

that, “It is not clear how occupational health and safety or compensation laws cover

[telework arrangements].” The centre goes on to say that “these laws are different in each

jurisdiction.” Opacity surrounding liability is to be expected, at least in the early stages of

mass telework adoption, but as it stands there is no movement towards universal

workplace safety standards for teleworkers, even though telework is gaining more

visibility. Rather than address the issue, the Canadian and United States governments are

embracing the murkiness of telework safety standards.

A May 31st, 2011 article of IT News Australia reported that the Australian

government had been working hard to increase telework amongst its citizens: they have

spent billions building a National Broadband Network capable of sustaining increased

traffic, as well as providing financial incentives to businesses that implement telework

policies, with the hope of becoming one of the top five OECD member countries for

teleworkers by the year 2020. Unlike the US and Canada though, Australian Workplace

Health and Safety legislation covers any type of work that is done, regardless of where it

is performed. According to the Australian government’s telework website

(www.telework.gov.au), health and safety protections even extend to other people living

in the home where work is being carried out. Therefore, it is possible for a country to
 49

have sizeable teleworking populations without shirking workplace safety regulations. It

appears the US and Canada are taking a “wait and see” approach before extending

workplace protections to teleworkers, and this may mean that some workers have to

sustain injuries on the job before these governments take action.

The state has historically been responsible for ensuring that employers provide

safe workplaces to its employees, and that employees are fairly compensated if they are

overworked. Office work poses significantly fewer health and safety risks than factory

work does, but that does not mean that there are no risks at all. According to researchers,

repetitive motion injuries are common to the 77 million American workers who use

computers for their jobs (Ijmker, Blatter, van der Beek, van Mechelen, and Bongers,

2006). Surveys done with office workers have recorded incidences of extreme head,

neck, arm, shoulder, and hand discomfort resulting from computer use to be as high 44%

in a given year (Ijmker et al, 2006).

In an office setting, the employer can purchase equipment that is less likely to

induce musculoskeletal injuries for workers, such as ergonomic chairs and keyboards, but

companies are not likely to shoulder the costs of purchasing these for home use, and

there’s no guarantee people would use them anyways. However, even if teleworkers did

use ergonomically designed equipment, it would not necessarily prevent repetitive

motion injuries from occurring (Green and Briggs, 1989). Telework can be quite

precarious, and generally without union presence; teleworkers also have very little sense

of the labor regulations or entitlements they should be afforded, making it easier for

employers to circumvent responsibility for injuries that do occur. (Quinlan, Mayhew, and

Bohle, 2001, p. 352). Given that teleworkers are isolated from one another, it is difficult
 50

for them to communicate with each other about injuries and workplace safety, and they

are especially disadvantaged if they wanted to collectively bargain for better conditions,

as their dispersed working environments adds another layer of difficulty to the already

sizeable task of organizing a union (Odgers, 1994).

Telework may provide productivity increases, but it comes with increased

feelings of isolation for workers. Several scholars have argued that teleworkers record

high levels of professional and social isolation (Gainey, Kelley, and Hill, 1999; Metzger

and Von Glinow, 1988). It is easy to claim that interactions between workers is an

interruption that hurts productivity, but it is also true that these social and professional

exchanges play a large role in maintaining good mental well-being for workers. For

example, some scholars have found that while teleworkers are generally more productive,

this is only true for those workers who do not experience feelings of professional

isolation (Golden, Veiga, and Dino, 2008, p. 1416).

In the workplaces where some employees are allowed to telework while their

coworkers are located, studies have found that there is low worker satisfaction and high

turnover, especially for those stuck in the office as they have the perception, real or not,

that their teleworking counterparts have it easier as a result of the arrangement (Golden,

2007). Productivity tends to decrease for teleworkers who lack even occasional face-to-

face interaction with their coworkers. Substantial increases in productivity, and the

feeling of seclusion that accompanies it, is really just another way of describing

overwork. A study by Noonan and Glass indeed demonstrates that teleworkers are being

habitually overworked, making this perhaps the largest potential safety threat to remote

workers. The research, which was widely reported in the popular press, concluded that
 51

teleworkers on average worked six hours more per week than their non-teleworking

colleagues. As many of these workers are salaried employees, they are not paid overtime,

which means they are greatly weakening the value of their labor by working more hours

for less money (Noonan and Glass 2012, p. 44). This trend effectively erases any cost

benefit earned through energy savings or commuting expenses, and puts a new emotional

burden on workers.

It would not be fair to say that teleworking only benefits employers, but it is likely

the case that the economic savings are not equally distributed between workers and

employers, as the latter stand to substantially improve their profit margins by converting

their workforce to telework, whereas workers may only realize marginal cost savings

(and in fact may actually end up losing money). For example, depending on the distance

a non-teleworker travels to their office, the cost of fuel, insurance, and maintenance for a

vehicle could be noticeably reduced by telecommuting one or two days a week. Telework

has become an arrangement that nearly all office employees can take advantage of, to

some degree. Sun Microsystem employees saved an average of $870 per year in gasoline

and nearly $2000 dollars in wear and tear on their car by driving fewer miles (McKee et

al, 2009). However, the commuting costs are likely offset by the fact that the employee

has to cover the costs associated with working from home, such as increased home

energy and Internet use.

By one estimate, the total teleworking populations in the United States in 2005

only reduced total energy use nationally by less than 0.4% (Matthews and Williams,

2005, p. 21). Teleworkers spent less time driving to the office, but the overall amount of

driving stayed roughly the same. Another study concluded that the savings on fuel for a
 52

single commuter is slightly greater than the cost of increased home energy usage for that

person to work from home. Depending on the estimate, it may be cheaper, if only barely,

for an employee to telework if you look at energy savings alone, but it is a very thin

margin (Kitou and Horvath, 2008). It is impossible to conclude exactly how much

teleworkers shift energy use, but the possibility that telework has a net zero effect on

commuter and environmental output is real (Allenby and Richards, 1999). Even if

telework does reduce carbon emissions and fossil fuel consumption, it is likely

considerably less than proponents of telework estimate.

People may use supplementary teleworking, which Gareis defines as working

from home less than one day a week, when they are sick and cannot make it to work, or

who have children who require attention (Gareis, 2002). An article in Computer World

magazine even found that there is often a spike in telework requests for located

employees whenever gas prices rise in North America, as more and more people seek to

avoid long and costly commutes (Hamblen and Thibodeau, 2005). Their typical

arrangement may include absolutely zero teleworking days, but by virtue of the fact that

so much office work can be done from distributed locations, teleworking on an as-needed

basis is becoming more common. There is compelling evidence that teleworkers enjoy

less stress from diminished commuting, and reduced anxiety about a lack of control over

their work and leisure schedules (Kelly, Tranby, and Moen, 2011).

As one might expect though, there is also support to the contrary, especially in the

cases of workers who have children. A study by De Lay concluded that telework is first

and foremost used as a method for organizing paid employment, not organizing family

life. De Lay argues that this results in an arrangement that is “specifically targeted toward
 53

relieving stress due to job structure, and, thus, does not address family issues” (De Lay

1995 p. 53). Teleworking, it is often claimed, will help people attend to their family

needs, but as Da Ley points out, telework actually functions so that the needs of the

family simply interfere less with work. To put it another way, telework does not make it

easier to attend to family life, it makes it so that family life interferes less with one’s

ability to work: that is what it is designed to do. Other scholars have arrived at similar

conclusions. Teleworkers are more likely to attend to domestic labor and child care

during peak “office work” hours, which then pushes their paid employment into the late

evening, early morning, or weekends (Kraut, 1989). This is hardly what one would call

balance.

Telework arrangements rarely make it easier to manage other parts of one’s life,

mostly because people generally feel that managers and profit interests ultimately

determine how work is to be completed regardless of whether that work is being done

from a coffee shop or from a cubicle (Kelly and Kalev, 2006). Not surprisingly, a survey

of IBM workers in 1996 found that teleworkers experienced no more work/life balance

than their office counterparts (Hill, Hawkins, and Miller, 1996). The situation is no better

in Australia, where indeed they have workplace protections for teleworkers, but which

have failed to be an effective deterrent to the stress of overwork, especially for women. A

February 12, 2012 article in the Sydney Sun Herald reported on a study, which found that

30% of Australians were working more than 45 hours a week, 70% of women with

children under the age of 9 in Australia reported feeling “often or almost always rushed

or pressed for time” (Browne, 2012). In the same article, several of the interviewees

expressed mixed feelings about workplace flexibility, saying that they were grateful for
 54

the opportunity to attend to family needs, but were disgruntled at the intrusion of their

work into all areas of family and leisure time.

This confounds perhaps the single biggest advantage telework allegedly offers

workers- a less stressful work/life balance. The added stress has an undeniable and deeply

problematic gendered component to it. Data on who is teleworking from a February 2014

study by the Flex+Strategy Group found that men make up 71% of teleworkers, and that

people with children were no more likely to take advantage of teleworking than single

people (Yost, May 2014). The most interesting finding is that women are far more likely

to be office and cubicle workers than men, and it is cubicle workers who most often

reported feeling as though they had less work/life balance than in the previous year (Yost,

February 2014). There is a pervasive myth that teleworking is most beneficial to women

with children, and while this may have some merit as a conceptual argument for

increasing telework, in reality women are far less likely to be in a position to take

advantage of it.

Telework is more likely to be used as an employment incentive to attract or retain

highly skilled managers and technicians, most of whom are men, rather than a

mechanism to alleviate stress for employees struggling to balance careers and families. In

the same study it was discovered that nearly 50% of teleworkers received training and

guidance on how to balance their work and family lives, while only 35% of office

workers received similar attention (Yost, February 2014). Clearly, it is the cubicle

workers who are need of training on balancing work and families, yet remain the least

likely to receive it. In a subsequent chapter of this project, I explore the subjective

experiences of teleworkers more closely by focusing on the contradiction over who is

 55

allowed to telework, why they do it, and what the implications are for doing so.

In brief, there is good reason to believe that teleworking is at best a mixed

blessing for working families and in all likelihood engenders overwork, stress, isolation,

reduced workplace safety, and precariousness into the knowledge economy. Shifting

employees to a telework scenario makes good business sense for a company: it can

reduce real estate costs tremendously, and save on energy expenditures. They have the

potential to retain high quality workers over longer periods of time, and can reduce

absenteeism. Workers, on the other hand, may enjoy a negligible reduction in the cost

associated with commuting, but in most cases are going to work more hours for their

employer, immediately nullifying their personal savings, and exposing themselves to

dangerous new levels of workplace precarity. Perhaps most troubling is the fact that

telework does nothing to bridge the gender gap. Women with children who are in a

position to take advantage of telework arrangements simply increase their already

overburdened work lives.

Costs to Companies

The decisions by Yahoo and Best Buy to end its telework policies in 2013 is

evidence that flexible work arrangements are less a sign of employer respect for the

personal and familial obligations of its employees, and more a strategically deployed

cost-cutting measure, or at best a benefit that can be manipulated for strategic managerial

purposes. The fact that Yahoo, Best Buy, and other major companies rescinded its

telework policies creates a lot of questions about the profitability of the practice as well.

In a March 2013 article in Business Insider, Best Buy CEO, Hubert Joly, said that the

culture of the company was in trouble and they needed to put “all hands on deck” in order
 56

to recover (Bhasin, 2013).

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer expressed a similar sentiment in a memo leaked to

the press, in which she called her employees back to the office. “Some of the best

decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people,

and impromptu team meetings,” she said. “Speed and quality are often sacrificed when

we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo, and that starts with physically being

together.” The justification for ending the work-at-home policies is unique because it

suggests that there is more to be gained by having workers present together than there is

by cutting real estate costs or lowering attrition.

Mayer, who was formerly an executive with Google, helped to build that

company’s famously attractive corporate offices in order to encourage Google employees

to spend time working together. A Business Insider article from March of 2013 revealed

some of the most beloved Google perks. They offer free gourmet food to employees,

available 24 hours a day, and a concierge service to attend to mundane tasks such as oil

changes, laundry, dry cleaning services, and even party planning. Google allows

employees to bring their pets to work; they have on-site day care, full gyms, massage

therapists, and intramural sports leagues. They even provide free transportation in the

Bay Area via private busses equipped with Wi-Fi to get workers to and from home in

comfort (Kevin Smith, 2013).

This partly explains why Mayer has a preference for an office free of teleworkers,

as the success of Google is partially explained, at least according to senior managers, by

the fact that most employees are working together. Mayer’s replacement at Google, Chief

Financial Officer Patrick Pichette explained in a February 2013 interview with the Sydney
 57

Morning Herald why Google doesn’t allow teleworking: "There is something magical

about sharing meals," said Pichette. "There is something magical about spending the time

together, about noodling on ideas, about asking at the computer 'What do you think of

this?' These are [the] magical moments that we think at Google are immensely important

in the development of your company, of your own personal development and [of]

building much stronger communities" (Grubb, 2013).

It is clear though that Google’s workplace perks are designed to keep employees

in the office because that is where Google can extract the most amount of surplus value

from their labor, as well as most efficiently manage the labor process. If people have to

be working somewhere, management would prefer them to be at Google’s office rather

than at home or in a coffee shop. Harry Braverman provides an answer as to why this

might be the case: he argues that the “purpose of the office is control over the enterprise,

and the purpose of office management is control over the office” (Braverman, 1998, 211).

While Braverman’s analysis is more pertinent to early clerical offices that served as the

nerve centers for industrial and financial enterprises, it can be extrapolated to cover the

knowledge work of tech companies like Google or Yahoo. Remote work technology may

be primed to allow increased flexibility for laborers to perform their work tasks from just

about anywhere, but the job of managing those workers has not been made any easier by

technology. Directing work, answering questions, driving increases to productivity, and

evaluating performance are all important tasks of the work manager that are made more

difficult, not easier, by having a remote workforce. In other words, it’s not as easy to

control the office if no one is working there.

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The need to exercise more control over the work process at Yahoo may partly

explain Mayer’s decision to rescind telework privileges for her employees. As reported in

a Huffington Post article from February 2013, several current and former employees of

Yahoo celebrated the decision to end telework because they believed there was a culture

of abuse and unaccountability at the company that needed to be reined in (Hindman,

2013). One former employee said that at Yahoo, “there are people slacking off like crazy,

not being available, spending a lot of time on non-Yahoo projects.” Several said that

there simply was too much flexibility and liberty with the work-anywhere policy. A

March 6, 2013 report by Brett Molina of USA Today found that Mayer had checked the

company’s Virtual Private Network, the cloud software that allows remote workers to log

in to do work from home, and found that people simply weren’t logging in very much,

but were still collecting a paycheck (Molina, 2013).

Mayer could have fired all the employees who were not registering enough hours

though, so why the full-scale telework ban? It is possible that Mayer’s strategy was

simply to prompt a voluntary layoff of workers by eliminating the tech industry’s most

beloved perks, thereby avoiding being seen as a ruthless and cold industrialist. If this was

indeed her plan, it virtually ensures that the most talented and hard-working employees

would disappear en masse, as they have the most opportunities for other employment in

the industry, leaving only the lowest skilled, least creative, and most resentful employees

at Yahoo to fester. A more likely possibility is that Mayer rescinded the telework policy

at Yahoo because the work-anywhere policy was being abused, and because she was

intimately familiar with the success of workplace collaboration while working at Google.
 59

A study by Margrethe Olson, working in conjunction with the Diebold Group at

New York University’s School of Business Administration found that “the organizational

culture and managerial attitudes” are the factors most likely to influence whether

employees are allowed to telework (Huws et al., 1990, p. 2). A significant contributor to

why telework has been slow to grow since its conception is that management feels its

ability to supervise and motivate workers would be compromised in a telework scenario.

The situation at Yahoo before Mayer arrived may have confirmed some of the anxieties

held by many managers.

Another alternative to the ending of the telework program at Yahoo would have

been to increase the electronic surveillance of teleworkers, although this too is an

imperfect solution. According to Fairweather, the deployment of computer based

employment monitoring systems has been one way in which managers have been able to

allow teleworkers the freedom to work from home, while also keeping tabs on their

productivity (Fairweather, 1999, p. 41). Typically, this is in the form of key-stroke

counters, timers on idleness and phone calls, website tracking, and so on (Aiello and

Shao, 1993, p. 1011). Implementing such a program is often associated with decreased

employee morale, as workers register dissatisfaction over their loss of privacy, freedom,

and trust (Fairweather, 1999).

Given that teleworkers are already prone to feelings of isolation, adding

heightened surveillance to their work arrangement could lead to severe psychological

consequences (Bibby, 1996). As one worker suggested, surveillance while teleworking

was like “working as a slave and being whipped, not in our bodies but in our minds”

(Bibby, 1996). In addition, tech workers, such as those at Yahoo, would be the most
 60

capable of circumventing technological monitoring software, which means that Mayer

would have lost her workers’ trust and probably gained nothing in return.

There appear to be two major impediments to the corporate profitability of

telework: lack of managerial oversight over the work process, and the loss of a unique

type of workplace interaction. In the former case, a considerable amount of new

technology and software is proliferating specifically to make the oversight of remote

labor more effective. At some point it may become possible to monitor teleworkers using

less invasive surveillance techniques, but for the time being employers will have to

balance the benefits of having remote workers who may be occasionally taking advantage

of the limited oversight by refusing work. The second impediment is slightly more

abstract. Google, Yahoo and Best Buy all refer to this intangible, fleeting labor quality

that they believe is absolutely vital to a successful company, but cannot exactly explain

why or how. For example, they suggest that having people interacting spontaneously

leads to creative solutions to problems, and fosters teamwork and camaraderie. This

could be true, but it remains unclear if is this more important, and more profitable, than

the money saved by increased teleworking?

It is possible, indeed quite likely given the findings, that telework is only viable

for routinized, non-creative clerical and date-entry type work, but is a hindrance to the

creative labor elements of the post-Fordist workplace. These former activities are referred

to as “business processes,” an umbrella term for all the core work of a bureaucratic

institution that allows them to service employees and customers, such as payroll,

accounting, customer service, or accounts receivable (Dossani and Kenney, 2003, p. 5).

The authors argue that this labor is increasingly being outsourced to places like India and
 61

the Philippines, but that which necessitates face-to-face contact remains in Western

workplaces. “In a digital world any activity not requiring a physical presence can be

undertaken almost anywhere that is connected” (Dossani and Kenney, 2003, p.8).

Although the technology was not always capable of accommodating teleworkers

in the Fordist era, perhaps employers can now take advantage of cost savings by

outsourcing this back-end labor. However, Western workers in the new economy are

increasingly performing creative knowledge labor, which relies upon collaboration,

interaction, and spontaneity, things that simply do not work well, and perhaps never will

work well, for teleworkers. If employers are poised to realize the benefits of telework,

they will most likely be only able to employ it in the diminishing unskilled departments

where routinized work is carried out, or outsource it to low wage centers in the global

east and south.

Analysis and Conclusion

Telework arrangements are employed or withheld depending on the benefit it

brings to capital, and this decision alone determines when and how it will be used, if at

all. The contradictions outlined above encompass the historical antagonism that has

existed between capital and labor, and underlie this conclusion. In each of the above three

sections, we can see how this conflict manifests itself relative to remote work. Strategies

for growing a company’s profits can take many forms, but they are always paramount to

whether telework is adopted or not. Sometimes it benefits workers to have a telework

scenario, but only if it benefits workers and managers, or just managers, would it be

implemented. Telework occupies an ambiguous space in the spectrum of class struggle

because telework is seen as an attractive perk to employees, so that even if it benefits

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workers very little in the big picture, or not at all, workers are still willing and eager to

accept it. And even in the case where telework significantly contributes to overwork, the

negative consequences are easily overlooked. In short, capital is ambivalent about

telework.

In the first section, it is apparent that converting a company’s workforce to

telework has the potential to save a substantial amount of money. Real estate alone is one

of the biggest costs a large company has to shoulder: the larger the company gets, the

more space needed to house the workers, and the higher the costs become. Growing the

workforce but avoiding the costs associated with giving them a place to work, is a very

attractive prospect for any company. Telework can also increase productivity, cut down

on attrition, and save on energy. Both the United States government and the Canadian

government offer substantial tax credits to businesses that hire workers with disabilities, a

group that` is highly skilled and in many cases already prepared to work from home

(West and Anderson, 2005, p. 117). The avenues by which a company could increase its

profits by taking advantage of telework are plentiful.

Some of those methods are hostile to workers, such as the laying off of IT

workers as their labor is outsourced to the cloud, and some are less hostile- for example

selling off real estate and having workers located completely at home. How and to what

degree telework benefits employees, if at all, is not nearly as clear. The economic

benefits are ambiguous. Workers can save costs on their commute, but end up increasing

their home energy use, or driving their car to run more errands, or may move further

away from urban centers and contribute to suburban sprawl when a long commute is no

longer a deterrent to living where they want. The ramifications for working extra hours
 63

with no overtime pay and experiencing isolation, which are the standard in telework

scenarios, need to be explored further. Telework is still finding its legs, and many of the

potential drawbacks to this type of arrangement are still unknown to both employee and

employer, but rest assured that the latter is well prepared to ensure that the effects of

those problems never reach them.

In the industries where telework is being resisted by capital, a different paradigm

exists, and a familiar type of exploitation is manifesting itself, one in which overwork is

coupled with the relentless capture of cognitive value. As Nick Dyer-Witheford and

Greig de Peuter argue, working in certain industries such as tech or video games carries

with it an ambiance of “cool,” which masks the requirement that workers log excessive

hours in the office. In a workplace such as Electronic Arts, the video game giant, where

deadlines are merciless and “crunch time” is all the time, the need for collaboration

between workers is really the only way to deliver a product on time (Dyer-Witheford and

de Peuter, 2006). For this industry in particular, the need for balance between work and

family was captured famously by the disgruntled partner of a video game worker in a

blog post in November of 2004, in which the author detailed regular eighty-five hour

workweeks with no overtime pay, and a “put up or shut up and leave… human resources

policy” (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, 2009, p. 35-6). Having workers widely dispersed,

outside of direct supervision, and potentially unavailable in a pinch, is a liability that

cannot be afforded. Here too, the logic of neoliberalism conceals the exploitation by

positioning overwork as a privilege of working in a high tech “cool” industry like video

game production (or for Google).

In these industries, the money saved by implementing large telework operations

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would not be worth what is lost when employees are logging standard forty-hour

workweeks (or less), or where the value of creative collaboration slips into the ether.

Moreover, that these companies are the vanguard of resisting telework illustrates that the

network model is inaccurate for predicting how labor will be organized in the post-

Fordist environment. Physical centers are indeed necessary, especially for those

companies most attuned to the needs of the information economy.

It is a zero-sum game, in other words: corporate gains typically translate to

worker losses. The expectation is that time saved on a commute for example, is to be

translated into extra time spent working. Workplace flexibility becomes a metonym for

the absolution of employer responsibility for the mental and physical well-being of

workers. When asked if employers have any responsibility for the safety of a teleworker’s

home office space, one executive replied, "[i]f an employee wants . . . to work at home,

the employer should be absolved of any workplace liability if that workplace now

becomes the employee’s home” (Dutrow, 2001, p. 965). Never mind that a company may

have a policy that all or most employees are to telework, or that some managers may

strongly encourage telecommuting because it saves money, or that employees may have

other factors such as a family or a disability that contribute to their desire to telework: all

that matters is that workers are “choosing” to telework, thereby voluntarily forgoing all

workplace safety they expected from their employer. If workers “get” the flexibility perk,

then they can’t expect anything else from their employers. Here too, the antagonistic

relationship between capital and workers is clear.

There are two important avenues for future research on this topic. First, it is

difficult to predict how labor is to be organized in the post 2008 economy, or what role
 65

remote work will play in that reorganization of labor. Google CEO Larry Page said in an

interview that the economy could easily function, and would actually benefit, if we ended

the 40-hour workweek and allowed more people to have well-paying part-time jobs

(Fiegerman, 2014). Arguing that the amount of labor actually needed to sustain our

society is about 1% of what is currently being done, Page suggested that we “reduce the

work week and perhaps split one full-time job into multiple part-time jobs” (Fiegerman,

2014). He does not express whether these multiple part-time jobs would pay the same as

the full-time one they replaced, or have the same amount of benefits, but he appears to be

suggesting that they would, making this perhaps one of the most progressive suggestions

by a corporate CEO on the subject of unemployment.

In a July 18th article of the Financial Times, Jude Webber reported that the

Mexican telecom magnate Carlos Slim, allegedly the world’s second richest man, said at

a conference in Paraguay that reducing the workweek to three days would increase

productivity and contribute to increased quality of life for workers. Those employers able

to shoulder the risks associated with a revolutionary overhaul of labor practices are

considering their possibilities (Weber, 2013). This illustrates that the question of how to

organize labor in the Post-Fordist economy is far from settled. High unemployment is a

barrier to economic health, and splitting work hours between several different people

may prove to be one of a number of worthwhile, short-term strategies.

Another avenue for future research on this topic would be to explore the

expanding legal battles over whether workers have a fundamental right to adopt telework

policies, regardless of what their employers think is best. Companies like Google and

Yahoo may not be able to restrict telework for long, according to some legal experts in
 66

the United States, who believe that a company’s decision to prohibit programs that

contribute to increased work/life balance may be in violation of US labor laws.

In a July 28th, 2014 article in Forbes magazine, Caroline Fairchild suggests that

industries known for long hours and inflexible scheduling, such as banking or

technology, may unfairly hinder a woman’s chances at professional success because they

do not take into consideration the responsibilities of childcare and domestic labor, which

falls disproportionately on women. Men can succeed in these industries because they are

less likely to need flexible schedules to attend to domestic responsibilities, so the policies

against telework rarely apply to them. Under US employment law though, a workplace

rule cannot unreasonably affect one group more than another. Policies against telework

can be construed as an attempt to treat women differently, a problem the courts may soon

remedy (Fairchild, 2014).

To conclude, rather than a panacea for all types of workplace problems, telework

is nothing more than one potential method that managers of capital can employ under

specific sets of circumstances to increase profits. Predictions from the likes of Alvin, who

contends in the Third Wave that large groups of people with compatible jobs would all be

soon working from home, are simply too lofty and unrealistic. It fails to account for that

nuances of capital, the realities of workplace management and worker resistance, or the

changing needs of a post-Fordist economy. In some cases, it is much more beneficial to

the employer to have a quarter of the employees doing the work that once took many

more, and to make them work in the office rather than the “electronic cottage,” where

they can be pushed, evaluated, monitored, and forced to collaborate, all for the benefit of

the employer, and where an army of highly educated unemployed masses are waiting at
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the office doors for a chance to take the place of any workers unwilling to comply with

company demands. It is more likely that telework will be used to attract in-demand labor

of highly skilled managers and technicians, who prefer to telework so as to avoid

relocating, than it is to be offered to the millions of working mothers who are forced to

balance child care and work responsibilities. In the future battles between workers and

capital, telework will play a significant role, and this analysis suggests that it is far more

likely to be used as a means of controlling workers rather than liberating them.

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The Mother of All Hypocrites: Marissa Mayer and the Yahoo!

Telework Ban in the Popular Press

In February 2013, the CEO of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer, declared an end to telework

for her employees. News of Mayer’s controversial policy reversal quickly spread

throughout the mainstream media, and was widely discussed by experts and

commentators. Many analysts were genuinely concerned with figuring out what this

move meant for the emergent knowledge economy as a whole, and predicting what it

might mean for the millions of working families trying to create lives that truly balance

work and leisure. Yet, Mayer was not the first person to end telework at a major

company. Google and Facebook, two Silicon Valley giants, had been openly limiting

telework at its headquarters for years. Best Buy and Bank of America also ended its

telework programs at virtually the same time as Yahoo.

Marissa Mayer’s telecommuting ban garnered significantly more media attention,

both in quantity and quality, than other similar bans, which failed to generate much

public discussion at all even though they appeared at approximately the same time. The

continued struggle for work/life balance appears to be why Mayer’s decision was so

provocative, for it signaled a potential shift in the prevailing discourse that suggested

unimpeded telework was the wave of the future, and that it was an indispensable

arrangement for workers trying to juggle careers and family. However, analysis of the

extensive media discourse surrounding Mayer's announcement revealed that gender, and

contradictions surrounding domestic labor, were key drivers in how this story was told

and why it was considered important.

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Alvin Toffler predicted in the Third Wave a world of tiny ‘electronic cottages,’

where worker/citizens would all be comfortably toiling from home, enjoying reduced

commutes, closer proximity to family and community, and increased leisure time

(Toffler, 1980). As we saw in the previous chapter, this lofty prediction has failed to

materialize. We may in fact be working at home more, but we are definitely not working

less overall. Americans, employed full-time, averaged about 47 hours per week in 2014,

according to a Gallup Poll (Saad, 2014). And yet, there does seem to be a sense in the

popular press that Toffler’s calculation is inevitable, that because the technology allows

for telework, it can only increase over time. The scholarly literature on telework has

become much more complicated since Toffler wrote the Third Wave, but is often limited

to a discussion about whether telework has “good” or “bad” outcomes (Gajendran and

Harrison, 2007).

Despite the richness of the literature on telework in general, covered in the

previous two chapters, the contribution this chapter seeks to make is in the area of the

popular press coverage of telework, where there has been a noticeable lack of research.

Sue Shellenbarger performed a minor study that was published in the Wall Street Journal

in 1997, in which she compared popular depictions of telecommuting to informal surveys

she did with teleworkers (Shellenbarger, 1997). Her conclusions were essentially that

advertisers needed to ditch the stereotypes of the haggard teleworking woman, sitting in

bunny-slippers and pajamas all day, and instead start representing the diversity and

dedication of home-based workers (Shellenbarger, 1997). A limitation of her research is

that it focuses exclusively on early popular representations of telework in advertising,

however it does offer some valid criticisms, such as the growing need to move beyond
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the idea that teleworkers are all mothers, or even that we need to consider that

teleworkers may actually be working more than their office counterparts (Shellenbarger,

1997).

A study by Sebastian Böll, Dubravka Cecez-Kecmanovic, and John Campbell

looks at the comments sections of online news stories of Marissa Mayer’s telework ban,

in order to understand how the public more generally responded to it (Böll, Cecez-

Kecmanovic, and Campbell, 2014). However, that study does not look at the news stories

themselves, only the comments sections, and while it does illuminate what a small group

of interested readers think of the telework ban, it does little to explain how the news was

presented to us, and what ideological discourses are conveyed through those stories. My

study differs from the previous project by attempting to better understand how newspaper

readers – including readers of the digital versions of news publications – were presented

with news about Mayer’s ban, how the story is framed, and what ideological tropes are

conveyed.

Methodology

To generate a sample of articles to study, I conducted a Lexis Nexus Academic

search of all news articles containing the words “Marissa Mayer,” that appeared between

January 1 and March 31 of 2013: the month of the telework ban, as well as the month

preceding and following it. I narrowed the sample down further by filtering the articles to

just those that were placed in the “Flexible Work Arrangements” content category. This

yielded one hundred and forty-eight unique news stories in the US and international

press. Stories either appeared in news sections of the paper, and were assumed to provide

a balanced approach, or appeared in a commentary or editorial section, and were assumed

 71

to be more opinionated and one-sided. Of the 148 articles, seventy-six appeared in hard

news sections of the paper, and seventy-two appeared in commentary sections, such as

op-ed or employment columns. In a few cases, there were articles that were overtly

supportive or critical of Mayer’s ban, but appeared in the hard news sections nonetheless;

they are counted amongst the opinion pieces. These anomalies appeared mostly in highly

opinionated, soft news publications such as the New York Daily News or USA Today.

The methodology I employed to examine these articles is a critical discourse

analysis, using an inductive data investigation approach described by David Thomas

(2006). The outcome of such an analysis, according to Thomas, is the “development of

categories into a model or framework that summarizes the raw data and conveys key

themes and processes” (Thomas, 2006, p. 240). To build this framework, the researcher

begins with a close reading of the data until a familiarity with the content is established,

allowing the investigator to identify themes or categories in the raw data. Once these

broad categories are identified, the data is continuously reread and refined to ensure that

the themes are accurate and inclusive, and once no new categories emerge, it is assumed

that all the major themes have been identified. (Thomas, 2006, p. 241-2; Marshall, 1999,

p. 419).

Established categories contain all of the following, according to Thomas: thematic

titles that identify the category’s significance, descriptions of the categories, text from the

raw data that is exemplary of the themes, links that are drawn between the categories and

others in the study, and finally a framework or model in which the categories are situated,

which explains the data as a whole (Thomas, 1999, p. 240). The final task of the

researcher is to explain the data using the framework that has been built, to construct a
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cohesive explanatory model, so that readers can makes sense of the mass of information.

The application of this methodology led me to identify key terms or phrases that that

appeared frequently to describe the Mayer ban. For example, terms like “innovation,”

“perk,” “privilege,” and “nursery” showed up in a large proportion of the articles, which

made decoding their meaning a central task in understanding the context of the ban.

This method alone is incomplete, though; it must be considered in relation to the

broader tradition of critical discourse analysis, which provides a clearer context about the

goals of the methodology. According to Norman Fairclough, critical discourse analysis is

an “analytical framework—a theory and method—for studying language in its relation to

power and ideology” (Fairclough, 1995, p. 1). It is a source for people who are

“struggling against domination and oppression in its linguistic form” (Fairclough, 1995,

p. 1). He goes on to say that, “Power is conceptualized both in terms of asymmetries

between participants in discourse events, and in terms of unequal capacity to control how

texts are produced, distributed and consumed in particular sociocultural contexts”

(Fairclough, 1995, p. 1-2).

To conduct a critical discourse analysis then, a researcher integrates “(a) analysis

of text, (b) analysis of processes of text production, consumption and distribution, and (c)

sociocultural analysis of the discursive event” (Fairclough, 1995, p. 23). Using Thomas’

method as described above allows me to analyze the text, in this case news articles that

cover Marissa Mayer’s telework ban. But to analyze the processes of text production,

consumption, and distribution, and to conduct the sociocultural analysis of the discursive

event (the ban), I will employ Stuart Hall’s Encoding/Decoding Model (1980). Hall’s

model contends that the mass media transmit messages to us in a series of distinctive
 73

moments: production, circulation, distribution/consumption, and reproduction, and that

an event must become a story before it can be communicated to us (Hall, 1980, p. 128).

When they communicate to us, the media encode ideological meaning into a text in order

to transmit it to us in an understandable way, and then we as the consumer decode those

messages in ways that often, but do not always, reflect the dominant understanding (Hall,

1980). Consumers can read texts in dominant ways, which are the preferred interpretation

according to the producer, or they can decode the texts in ways that are largely

oppositional to what the producer intended. Finally, consumers can decode a text in a

negotiated manner, opting to make sense of the producer’s intended meaning in relation

their own experiences (Hall, 1980, p. 136-8).

The sample of news stories that cover Marissa Mayer’s telework ban are analyzed

using Thomas’ inductive method, which provided me with the ability to create conceptual

categories that explained the data as a whole. Using critical discourse analysis theories

from Fairclough and Hall afforded me the capability to situate those conceptual

categories within a wider context of journalistic standards, gender, power, and ideology.

The categories that emerged have limits in their explanatory power. To truly understand

the scope and impact of Marissa Mayer’s telework ban, attention needed to be given not

only to the content of the news stories, but also the structures of meaning that circulate in

and through the news media itself. For example, stories that were supportive of Mayer’s

telework ban may have avoided referencing the fact that she was a woman. Fairclough

calls this “implicit content,” or the absence of content, which itself can provide “valuable

insights into what is taken as given, as common sense” (Fairclough, 1995, p. 5-7).
 74

Ideology is often considered beyond the scope of debate, ergo the importance of

Mayer being a woman did not need to be mentioned, as readers would already suspect her

gender, given her name, and would understand the ideological paradigm in which her

gender operates. Likewise, using Hall’s model, we could explore the ways in which this

example demonstrated the dominant code, the likely intended reading of the story, which

might have deliberately ignored the fact that Mayer was a woman in order to satisfy a

professional norm of journalism, such as objectivity (Hall, 1980, p. 136). In short, a

critical discourse analysis necessitates a comprehensive framework that not only

organizes and explains the content of the sample, but also situates it within the wider

contextual and ideological discourses.

One of the ways to place a critical discourse analysis of news stories within its

proper context is to examine how and why a particular news story is selected for

coverage in the first place. Understanding how Mayer’s telework ban was covered in the

press requires us to explore why journalists felt it was newsworthy to begin with. The

first scholars to investigate this topic were Norwegian researchers Johan Gatlunch and

Mari Ruge, who presented their findings in the Journal of International Peace Research

in 1965. They began by asking how an event becomes news, arguing that the decision to

cover an event, or ignore it, was a culturally determined phenomenon (Galtung and Ruge,

1965, p. 65). Given the inability for journalists to cover everything that happens every

day, they argued that there needed to be a set of criteria by which journalists determined

what gets covered.

Gatlung and Ruge developed twelve factors that they posited were satisfied

whenever events became news: frequency, threshold, unambiguity, meaningfulness,

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consonance, unexpectedness, continuity, composition, reference to elite nations,

reference to elite people, reference to persons, and references to something negative

(Gatlung, and Ruge, 1965, p. 70-1). This study has long been considered the foundation

of news values research (Bell, 1991, p. 155). Their twelve factors are still considered and

cited as “prerequisites” for news selection (Herbert, 2000, p. 72-3).

Critics of Gatlung and Ruge have argued that their study privileges the idea that

news is ‘out there,’ waiting to be covered, when in reality news is constructed by

journalists, it is produced by them and situated within particular contexts of meaning

(Vasterman, 1995). Stuart Hall adopts a similar critique of Gatlung and Ruge, suggesting

that the factors they outline may be useful in explaining how an event becomes news, but

these conditions do little to explain the ideological justification behind these news factors

themselves (Hall, 1973). In other words, Gatlung and Ruge are correct that elite persons

generate coverage, but Hall would argue that there is no discussion as to why this is the

case, or what that tells us about our societies’ structures of power. Hartly points out that

some news stories receive considerable amounts of news coverage without fulfilling any

of Gatlung and Ruge’s news factors (Hartly, 1982). This is explained by the fact that

political and economic concerns, which fluctuate considerably, do not fit into Gatlung

and Ruge’s system very well (McQuail, 1994, p. 271). All told, there are political,

economic, and ideological factors that shape how news story are selected, which are not

captured in Gatlung and Ruge’s schematic.

Attempts have been made to update Gatlung and Ruge’s theory. For example

Deirdre O’Neill and Tony Harcup developed an alternative set of factors that addressed

the shortcomings of the Gatlung and Ruge (O’Neill and Harcup, 2001). In their ten
 76

criteria they include entertainment news, which can comprise stories about sex or human

interest, and also a category dedicated to the ideological or political economic interests of

the news outlet (O’Neill and Harcup, 2000, p. 279). They claim that journalists do not

have an accepted list of values that determine what stories to cover, but the scholarship

on news values has afforded researchers a solid set of criteria that explains, with relative

accuracy, why an event becomes news.

Stories that involve elite persons, in surprising circumstances, in which many

people are affected, tend to garner significant news coverage (O’Neill and Harcup, 2009).

This could easily explain why Mayer’s telework ban was so widely commented upon. As

one of only fifty-three female CEOs of a Fortune 1000 company, Mayer was also 33 and

pregnant when Yahoo poached her from Google (Weise, 2013). Her youth, her parental

status, and her gender made her a unique focus of public analysis on the hot topic of

telework. The Yahoo telework ban satisfied a number of conventional news values

according to Gatlung and Ruge, as well as the one developed by O’Neill and Harcup. In

this chapter, I used the study of news values to situate the telework ban within its

discursive context.

Situating the news stories into proper context also means exploring the

journalistic convention of objectivity, and balance. The news stories in this sample fall

into two distinct categories: stories that were supportive of Mayer and her ban, and

stories that were critical. Using Mayer as the focus of a discussion about telework

highlighted a clear dichotomy of supporters and critics, which maximized the drama,

increased interest in the story, and allowed journalists a semblance of objectivity. This

dichotomous news coverage reflects the fact that like most news stories, journalists
 77

attempted to cover Marissa Mayer’s telework ban in an objective way. According to

Gaye Tuchman, objectivity in news reporting is a reflection of a journalist’s desire to

insulate him or herself from professional risk by providing readers with at least two

opinions from opposing sides of an issue (Tuchman, 1972). Journalists can plausibly

claim that they are reporting just the facts, and are not injecting their own opinions into a

story. (Tuchman, 1972, p. 666).

However, according to Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John N.

Clarke, and Brian Roberts, this drive for objectivity is a problem because it is sometimes

manufactured: stories are presented as a debate between two opposing forces so as to

maximize drama and enhance the newsworthiness of the story (Hall, Critcher, Jefferson,

Clarke, and Roberts, 1978, p. 58). Positioning a story this way is a journalistic convention

that serves to make stories understandable to the public. “An event only ‘makes sense’ if

it can be located within a range of known social and cultural identifications,” states Hall

(Hall, et al, 1978, p. 54). Therefore, it is clear that Mayer’s ban was newsworthy partially

because it allowed journalists to discuss telework using a specific person as the central

character, while at the same ensuring that the story could be told in an objective way,

with unambiguous boundaries between sides.

The following analysis is separated into two broad sections that reflect the

objective coverage, with several sub-themes that fall into those sections. Through this

analysis, I exposed two extremely problematic issues within the second category, both of

which revolve around Mayer’s treatment in the press. First, the fact that Marissa Mayer

was singled out for attention by the media reflects the circumstance that as a woman, and

a mother, she was an attractive target for public media scrutiny. Second, as a result, the
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media placed Mayer into a classic double bind, meaning that because she is a woman, she

would be exposed to negative consequences in the public sphere regardless of if she

opted to end telework or not. But first, let us examine the results of the critical discourse

analysis to see how these problems were identified.

Why Ban Telework?: “The Latest Innovation for Creating

Innovation.”

New York Times journalists Claire Cain Miller and Catherine Rampell argued that

Mayer was “taking on one of the country's biggest workplace issues: whether the ability

to work from home, and other flexible arrangements, leads to greater productivity or

inhibits innovation and collaboration” (Miller and Rampell, 2013). Comments such as

this are common for the articles in the sample. One of the major sub-themes of this

category is a preoccupation with the concept of “innovation.” This word appears a

staggering seventy times in the sample, and is used in a variety of ways. It is one of the

central terms by which we are to make sense of the media’s justification for Mayer’s ban.

Understanding how it is used is key to making sense of the news coverage of the telework

ban. The term innovation is used to describe the unique product of interaction and

communication that happens spontaneously between coworkers in a collocated work

environment and it is thus also used to explain Mayer’s telework ban as being an

innovative decision.

In the former manner, innovation in the workplace is considered fundamental to

tech industry success, and it is only possible when workers are together, bouncing ideas

off each other. The Christian Science Monitor defended Mayer in an op-ed published on

February 26th, 2013, arguing that perhaps a new work arrangement was exactly what was
 79

needed to stir creative, innovative ideas at the struggling Internet giant: “Companies rise

or fall more quickly than ever based on their ability to generate new services and

products” (Christian Science Monitor, 2013). They even suggested that unhappy workers

might soon grow to appreciate the new arrangement, if it works out as Mayer hopes. A

story from National Public Radio also from February, 2013 suggested that workplaces

can either be flexible, or be “serendipitous,” but they cannot be both at the same time

(Noguchi, 2013). Researchers from various disciplines such as occupational psychology

and economics have repeatedly found that random interactions and spontaneous

collaboration can lead to unintended positive benefits to workers and their employers

(Noguchi, 2013). Innovation in this sense is used to signify the types of new, creative

ideas that are needed in order to sustain companies in the highly competitive knowledge

economy through particular working conditions.

If you do not have new ideas, then you have a failing tech company—or so goes

this logic. As such, banning telework was a business decision for Mayer, a strategy to

combat a lack of creativity, increase collaboration, and generate new ideas. As one

commentator put it, Mayer “inherited a complete mess” at Yahoo (Weise, 2013). The

culture of the company was not conducive to the type of innovation that would make it

competitive. Another use of innovation focused on Mayer herself as being tough enough

to acknowledge an uncomfortable truth about located working and collaboration, and

deploying an innovative, if unpopular, solution. Innovation is the term used to defend

Marissa Mayer by arguing that she was going against the grain, trying something new,

and taking a much-needed risk. Susan Milligan of US News and World Report called the

idea of everyone working face-to-face “refreshingly retro,” arguing that Mayer has forced
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us all to confront the reality about the inherent value of collaboration (Milligan, 2013).

Banning telework may be “the latest innovation for creating innovation” (Christian

Science Monitor, 2013). Articles referred to innovation being “driven,” “produced,” or

“created” by clever, yet tough technology company CEOs like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates,

Eric Schmidt of Google, and now Marissa Mayer (Cook, 2013).

Mayer’s approach at Yahoo was characterized as “borrowing from the playbook

of Google” (Miller and Rampell, 2013). When Mayer left Google, it was the most

successful tech company on the globe, with a number of important perks and policies that

ensured happy, productive employees, and a litany of successful, innovative commodities

to show for it. When Mayer got to Yahoo, she found low morale, unproductive workers,

falling profits, and policies that seemed to be fairly evident contributors to these

problems. She introduced free food in the cafeterias, and handed out free iPhones and

Android devices to all her employees in order to boost morale and keep workers on site,

policies that were met with a high degree of satisfaction (Miller and Perlroth, 2013).

While Google may not have official decree banning telework like Yahoo now has,

their entire philosophy of the workplace was designed to indirectly encourage workers to

stay put in the office. The success that Mayer had at Google was often mentioned in the

sample articles. According to Michelle Gillet, there are Silicon Valley companies that

allowed telework, such as Yahoo and Sun Microsystems, and there are others that do not,

such as Google and Facebook. Mayer was brought from Google to Yahoo with the

purpose of making the work culture of the latter more like the former. Google is the

“vanguard of the hip workplace culture” (The Miami Herald, 2013), while Yahoo was

described as “a ship in danger of sinking” (The Times and Transcript, March 5, 2013).
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That Mayer was with Google from its inception, being the 20th employee, that she helped

create the iconic Google Search page (amongst other popular products), and was the first

female engineer to be on staff there, are all-important factors in demonstrating that her

role was specifically to bring all of the magic of Google to Yahoo, including the former’s

work culture (Gillet, 2013).

Telework: Employee Perk or a Worker’s Right?

Another common sub-theme characterizing the defense of Mayer’s ban suggested

that her critics were mistaken in believing that telework was a right of workers, rather

than just another perk that could be extended or revoked depending on management

needs at the moment. The word “perk” appears eighteen times in the sample, and when

used it often situates telework within a discursive context of workplace bonuses, which

can include gym memberships, smartphones, gourmet food, and other non-essential

incentives offered to employees. The word “privilege,” is also used to describe telework

broadly, and it was used thirteen times in the sample. These are loaded terms, as they

convey an important ideological sentiment. A perk or a privilege is a bonus, it is extra, it

is not a standard component of the workplace agreement, and certainly not something

offered to all employees at every job. It is not something that has to be given to

employees, rather it is something that is earned, or used as motivation. Perks and

privileges imply impermanence. This distinction is central to understanding how some

commenters defended Mayer’s ban.

As one commentator put it, “I feel privileged to telecommute, but I know it’s not

a right” (Reighart, 2013). Telework was placed alongside other Silicon Valley perks such

as free food, smartphones, or intramural sports leagues as tools to attract and retain talent,
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but needs to remain contiguous to the actual work of the company. According to an

article in the National Post, the move to ban telework was celebrated by some in the

corporate world who lamented the transformation of telework from a perk to an

expectation. "Clearly there's a sense of entitlement amongst the ranks [at Yahoo] that

seem to think that irrespective of how hard they work or how maybe uncomfortable they

are in community work that the company's just going to continue to perpetuate it - that's

not the case," said Nick Ballettais, the CEO of a web company called TalkPoint

(Boesveld, 2013). It seems that other CEOs may have been her staunchest defenders if

only for doing what they themselves felt was beyond their own ability to do. Penelope

Trunk, a Silicon Valley career advisor, says that telework has been “implicitly banned” in

the tech industry for years, largely due to the reasons Mayer articulated (Boesveld, 2013).

Trunk suggests that Mayer simply was the one with the nerve to talk the talk, and walk

the walk.

Defenders of the telework ban pointed to the many other companies that were

restructuring their employees’ work arrangements at the same time as evidence that

Mayer had done nothing unusual by banning telework at Yahoo. Bank of America and

Zappos, the online retailer, both ended telework programs in 2013 (Miller and Rampell,

2013). Booz Allen Hamilton and Aetna are maintaining, although modifying, their

telework programs in order to figure out how to better balance the

collaboration/productivity dichotomy (Miller and Rampell, 2013). Katherine Rushton, the

Media, Telecoms, and Technology editor for the Independent said that Mayer’s decision

marked a “radical step” in an industry that favors flexibility and innovation, while noting

that a “flurry of resignations” are sure to follow, and that might be the ultimate strategy
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of the move (Rushton, 2013). As Rushton suggested, eliminating a coveted perk like

telework may have triggered massive resignations, eliminating the need for Mayer to lay

off workers. Bringing workers back in house would mean, “jettisoning a lot of

deadwood” (Weise, 2013).

An obvious reason to ban telework is that it can be difficult to monitor workers by

remote, which gives credibility to Mayer’s defenders who argued that telework ought to

be a perk reserved only for workers who have demonstrated that they can work efficiently

from home, and was not a right of all workers. Hamish McRae of the Independent asked,

“How do you manage people if you cannot see them” (McRae, 2013). McRae suggested

that Mayer was simply trying to discover a solution to a longstanding problem of the

flexible workplace, and while telework is not likely to disappear from our midst as a

result of Mayer’s decision, it may be reined in worldwide before it becomes the norm for

core workers with the technology to take advantage of it (McRae, 2013). Edward Glaeser

said that Mayer’s decision reflects the fact that telework is neither always right nor

always wrong, but is right for certain circumstances (Glaeser, 2013).

Furthermore, Glaeser argues that the telework ban proved that face-to-face time

between employees is more important than anyone could have realized, and technology is

unprepared to ever fully replace real contact. (Glaeser, 2013). If it is difficult or

impossible to oversee employees, then it is possible that workers are going to slack off on

the job, or at the very least, they will be prone to repeated interruptions at home. Katie

Roiphe of Slate made the case against telework in an article published February 27th,

2013. Roiphe was skeptical about the prevalence of what she deemed to be “righteous

insistence that we should tear down the walls, break down the barriers, and all toil away
 84

in our bathtubs,” arguing that she is not convinced it is possible that “domestic life can

hum on unfettered around us as we are all concentrating like Tolstoy on the task at hand”

(Roiphe, 2013). The Washington Post listed “Lack of oversight and the potential for

employees to shirk duties” as one of the main drawbacks for employers with telework

policies (Russell, 2013).

Defending Mayer’s Ban

To summarize, the articles that defended Marissa Mayer’s telework ban contained

a number of salient sub-themes. Innovation was thought to be lacking at Yahoo, requiring

someone to make an honest assessment, acknowledge that collaboration and teleworking

were incompatible, and crack the whip. Creating innovation required innovation. The

culture at Yahoo before Mayer arrived was defective. Mayer was a superstar at Google,

whose work culture was the complete opposite of Yahoo, so there is good reason to

believe that she was brought in to Yahoo in order to make it more like Google. Defenders

were eager to point out that Mayer was simply bringing Yahoo in line with other

successful tech giants like Apple and Facebook, companies with more efficacious work

cultures. It was argued that workers communicate better when they are together, and

management can more efficiently observe their employees, and prevent shirking work, if

they are all in a single location.

Perhaps the most controversial argument of Mayer’s defenders was that people do

not have a legitimate expectation to be able to work by remote. Telework is a perk and a

privilege, and as such it can be revoked and re-implemented whenever the boss sees fit.

This line of argument was more contentious because while telework may be, legally

speaking, just another perk, the ability to have flexible work arrangements is a major
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determinant in how families live their lives, and that makes it seem like more than just

another workplace privilege. As we turn now to the articles that were critical of Mayer’s

ban, we can better see how this conflict was reflected in the press coverage.

Criticisms of Mayer and the Ban

The other major category of articles was critical of Mayer’s ban. She was attacked

in three ways: for failing to recognize the irony in her decision, for being a hypocrite, and

for being inflexible. First, many found it ironic for a technology company to ban telework

when that firm produces and relies upon remote Internet connectivity; second, critics

targeted Mayer’s personal circumstances, specifically focusing on her age, gender,

personal wealth, and parental status, and the expectations the public has for her to act in a

certain way based upon those characteristics. Some of these articles were critical of

Mayer personally, but not all. These articles appear in the next section. In the third

section, I examine the articles that criticized Mayer for being inflexible, and harboring an

outdated sense of workplace organization. What they all had in common was a

generalized uncertainty about whether or not Mayer’s identity as a woman and role as a

mother should have altered her decision to kill telework at Yahoo. Moreover, questions

arose about whether some of these personal factors, such as her extreme wealth and

corporate power, made her disconnected from contemporary workplace needs; this

opened her up to a barrage of criticism from which many of her peers in the industry

were largely immune.

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“Painful Irony:” Criticism of Marissa Mayer

Commentators had a field day exploiting two awkwardly ironic circumstances of

the Yahoo telework ban. Irony, or some variation on that phrase, appeared eighteen times

in the sample. In many cases, commentators made mention of the fact that Yahoo helped

build the Internet that made possible remote work in the first place, and that it continues

to try and sell the public the idea that it can provide the best technology for keeping

people, and workers, interconnected. And yet Yahoo was signaling that no amount of

technology could replace the effectiveness of face-to-face contact. Charles Toogood of

the Birmingham Post mused if anyone else found it as “deeply ironic” as he did that

“those very firms who market and sell the products and services that encourage

telecommuting are the same ones who seem to frown on the practice?!” (Toogood, 2013).

Jena McGregor said it was hard to ignore the “painful irony” of an Internet giant,

whose very product is remote connectivity and that houses a human resources department

insistent that good work can only be done in a central physical location (McGregor,

2013). The editorial board of the Australian Financial Review said, “of course it’s ironic

the memo came from a chief executive whose company is in the business of promoting

all things Internet” (Australian Financial Review Editorial Board, 2013). Farhad Manjoo

of Slate called Mayer’s inability to recognize the irony in her telework ban as “myopic,

unfriendly,” and even “boneheaded” (Manjoo, 2013). Manjoo attempted to make the case

that flexibility has to be a central workplace principle for any company that wants to keep

talented people happy. While Manjoo supports the idea that collaboration is important,

and he can understand Mayer’s logic, he is skeptical of the idea that proper collaboration

cannot be recreated through technology. This is a recurring theme in many of the articles
 87

criticizing Mayer. If collaboration is so important, then foster more connections through

technology, they argue. After all, the goal of a company like Yahoo is to create products

that make remote collaboration possible.

The media did not attack Mayer on a personal level for this ironic circumstance.

Jena McGregor’s article referenced the fact that Google also does not allow

telecommuting, and this was ironic for the same reason (McGregor, 2013). Charles

Toogood’s article also made reference to the fact that the tech industry in general frowns

upon remote work while at the same time selling a product that makes it possible

(Toogood, 2013). In fact, all of the above mentioned articles place Yahoo’s telework ban

within the context of a larger trend of physically located work within the tech industry.

This is important because, even if the commentators do not agree with the telework ban,

they do not necessarily blame Mayer personally for making a poor decision, but instead

suggest that she is simply one more CEO to adopt a trend with which they disagree. In

other words, this particular criticism – that it is ironic for a tech company to ban telework

– was impersonal and professional.

“That Nursery!” Marissa Mayer as a Hypocrite

The same cannot be said for the second oft-referenced irony, which is that Mayer

built a luxurious nursery into her Yahoo office in order to split work and childcare duties,

while ignoring that need for her employees. This is another situation in which Mayer was

depicted as the number one nemesis of working mothers. In the 148 unique articles in the

sample, fifty of the articles made mention of the fact that Mayer built a nursery into the

Yahoo offices for her newborn son. Ten of the articles used the word “hypocrite” or

“hypocrisy” when reporting on the nursery. In a Daily Mail article from February 26th, an
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employee asked what would happen if his wife brought their son to work at Yahoo and

set the baby up in the adjacent cubicle (Larson and Peterson, 2012, p. 1).

Another anonymous staffer interviewed by the Independent was angry that Mayer

had the audacity to complain about empty parking lots at Yahoo offices, presumably

because workers were working from home, when she was the only one with the money or

authority to simply build a nursery wherever she liked, effectively bringing her home

wherever she goes (Brown, 2013). This staffer articulated one of the major complaints

typically made about powerful corporate women, which is that they invoke feminism as

the foundation for policies that are disconnected from the realities of working mothers.

“When a working mother is standing behind this,” said one Yahoo working mom, “you

know you’re a long way from a culture that will honor the thankless sacrifices that

women too often make” (Brown, 2013). Likewise, it was suggested, that Mayer did not

make any friends with working mothers when, after having her first child, she publicly

stated that it was “way easier” than people had made it out to be (Peck, 2012).

Working mothers writing in the press registered some of the most vitriol for

Marissa Mayer, calling her a hypocrite with no intention of helping working mothers, and

“completely out of touch with the modern workplace” (Blakely, 2013). Many

commentators identified the privilege gap between Mayer and her employees as it relates

to child care, suggesting that what makes a real working mother is the unique class

position that forces them to struggle to make work and family stay in harmony. Barbara

Ellen in the UK’s Observer argued that the criticism that Mayer was receiving was

justified because her position as CEO did not excuse her “arrogant lack of interest in her

employees’ lives” (Ellen, 2013).

 89

In another article called ‘The New Mommy Wars,” Joanne Bamberger of USA

Today alleged that Mayer had launched “the latest salvo in the war on moms.” “The

amount of household help they [wealthy female executives] can afford to manage their

family lives,” she continued, “isn't a reality for the vast majority of women and never will

be” (Bamberger, 2013). With Mayer’s decision, there was a sense in the articles that not

only are her childcare concerns completely different from her working class employees

on a personal level, but that people felt they were fundamentally unimportant to her on a

professional level, as well.

There was a sizeable contingent that took aim at Mayer for undoing the hard work

that feminist activists had put in trying to build a workplace that is less hostile to working

mothers. Angela Mollard suggested that Mayer has embraced a working model that

simply demands too much from people, regardless of if they have children or not. Mayer

shows that we are unable to break free from “the conventional working model as patented

by the patriarchy” (Mollard, 2013). Margaret Carlson leveled vicious criticism at Mayer

for publicly declining the feminist label, while at the same time sitting in a position where

she clearly enjoys the benefit of its power – and also for treating important and hard won

benefits like maternity leave as though it were “for sissies” (Margaret Carlson, 2013).

The same was true for many of the experts on work/life balance, who also argued

that Mayer was setting back a trend they had been carefully nurturing for years. Kate

Lister of the Telework Research Network said that while Yahoo may be moving away

from telework, 100 more companies were going in the opposite direction (Smolkin,

2013). Kathie Lingle, from the Alliance for Work-Life Progress, said that the problem at

Yahoo was poor management and oversight, not telework, and that Mayer was sending
 90

the wrong message with her ban (Smolkin, 2013). Jack Nilles of Jala International, the

man who is credited with coining the terms “telework” and “telecommute,” was quoted in

an article as saying that “Yahoo’s Mayer is misguided if she believes just having staff in

the same place will lead to innovation (The New Zealand Herald, 2013). He went on to

say, “Telecommuters come into the office when togetherness is necessary and work at

home or elsewhere when togetherness is an impediment” (The New Zealand Herald,

2013). In these cases, advocates of telework had struggled to change the hegemony of

remote work, to transform its public perception. Then out of the blue, Marissa Mayer

casually and carelessly destabilized years of their hard work with a simple company

edict.

The popular press articles that were critical of Mayer’s decision tended to rely on

the argument, true or not, that flexibility was better for working families than inflexible

work arrangements, and that Mayer represented an old way of doing business: an

unfriendly way. The information revolution means that work need not be located, and

Mayer is depicted as treacherously out of touch with the evolution of the modern

workplace, and thus with modern families, by instituting such draconian policies. Mayer

became in many ways a metonym for antiquated business policies, the quintessential boss

of the twentieth century: cold, calculating, distant, obsessed with profits at all costs, and

entirely willing to allow her employees to live under a set of circumstances from which

she is both financially and politically immune. What makes her different, however, is the

fact that she is a woman, a mother, making her decision to act like an emotionless

industrialist somehow surprising.

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“I Really Thought Workplaces Were Moving Toward More

Flexibility.”

One of the popular sub-themes for criticizing Mayer’s decision was to defend the

concept of flexibility, and these pieces maligned Mayer for being the enemy of working

families, all of whom desire more flexibility. Flexibility appeared in the sample 177

times, more than any other term. Generally speaking, flexibility is looked at favorably, as

its opposite is a pejorative term. Therefore, using it in reference to the telework ban

automatically situated Mayer in a negative light, as someone who is inflexible, rigid, and

detached. Lisa Belkin, a columnist for the Huffington Post, accused Mayer of being out

of touch with the needs of working mothers, and of being stuck in the past when she

ended telework (Belkin, 2013).

Emma G. Keller of the Guardian said, “Whatever flexibility Yahoo employees

previously enjoyed will completely vanish” (Keller, 2013). Another article pointed out

that Mayer missed the fact that most young workers had an expectation to workplace

flexibility. “Employees, especially younger ones, expect to be able to work remotely,

analysts say. And over all, the trend is toward greater workplace flexibility” (Miller and

Rampell, 2013). There was sense in some of these examples that people were genuinely

surprised at the Yahoo decision because they felt that telework was on an inevitable

upswing. Carol J. Auster, professor of sociology at Franklin & Marshall College, was

quoted in an article as being stunned by the sudden Yahoo move. "I really thought

workplaces were moving toward more flexibility," she said (Cassidy, 2013).

Flexibility was an especially contentious topic when discussing mothers. The

language used to describe flexibility was not about choice, but of necessity and rights.
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“Moms need flexibility,” said Joanne Bamberger in USA Today (Bamberger, 2013). Ruth

Marcus of the Washington Post said workplace flexibility “allowed me to cling, however

tenuously, to the level of adequate mommy” (Marcus, 2013). Katrina Onstad of the Globe

and Mail said, “It’s symbolically brutal that a woman reaches rarely scaled corporate

heights and then immediately eradicates work flexibility, an arrangement so many

women rely on to stay in the working world” (Onstad, 2013).

Genevieve Meegan of the Advertiser in Australia contended that Mayer’s decision

flew “in the face of global employer trends offering greater flexibility and choice,

particularly to working parents” (Meegan, 2013). In this line of argument, Mayer was

depicted as out of touch with the business and workplace trends, which showed that

workplace flexibility was globally a popular option. They also painted her as hopelessly

disconnected from the needs of working mothers specifically. She was criticized for her

lack of attention to the global workplace trends that placed employee work/life balance

on par with profits.

Discussion

At the forefront of criticism was both Marissa Mayer’s class position as a wealthy

CEO, and the expectations placed on her as a young mother, and therefore somehow

representing the interests of mothers everywhere. It is easy to understand the outrage at

Mayer’s decision to rescind flexible work arrangements, especially when Mayer herself

enjoys the finances to create whatever childcare model is most convenient for her: a

luxury that most other working mothers could never imagine. It makes her a very easy

target of the frustrations felt by working people stretched beyond their financial and

personal limits. The trope that Mayer is unsympathetic to the needs of working families
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was not made any better by the fact that she built the nursery into her Yahoo office, and

took a very short maternity leave: two circumstances that did not go unnoticed by the

press.

While Mayer was crucified for prioritizing the interests of capital over the

interests of families, the criticism was compounded by the fact that Mayer is a woman

and a mother, who was accused of betraying her gender. Her critics charged her with

starting a trend, or at least giving credibility to a trend, of reduced telecommuting options

for working families. This is not accurate, since the discussion about work/life balance

has been ongoing for years, and she was not the first to end telework. What is unique

about her though, are the expectations placed on her as a mother and a woman, a pressure

to represent the interests of those like her. Advocates of telework argued that she could

have solved the problems at Yahoo while protecting the flexibility the workers came to

expect. But Mayer was the CEO of Yahoo, and she felt that telework had to go. To argue

then that the workers deserved telecommuting options; that she owed it to her workers to

protect that option, or even that it is a need of workers, is a different argument altogether,

one that goes far beyond Mayer and Yahoo.

What is newsworthy about this story then is not that a Silicon Valley tech

company ended its telework policy; it is that a mother in a position of power acted more

like a boss than a mother. According to O’Neil and Harcup, journalists often attempt to

tell news stories by focusing on the elite persons involved in an event, rather than

struggling to make a meaningful, interesting story about an abstract concept (O’Neill and

Harcup, p. 165). This is likely why Mayer’s telework ban was so inviting as a discussion

topic by news outlets, because it gave a face to an important, yet elusive concept.
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Advocates for working families demonized Mayer in the press, depicting her as out of

touch with workplace trends that place a larger importance on flexibility and less

significance on face time and direct supervision.

Supporters of Mayer focused more on the toxic environment at Yahoo, and

whether or not the telework ban stood a chance at alleviating it, than they did on whether

the telework ban was harming working families. The opinions that were supportive of

Mayer focused considerable attention on whether or not workplace analysts and

commentators had misjudged the future of flexible workplaces. In order to be supportive

of the telework ban at Yahoo, one had to ignore the effect it was going to have on

working families, particularly parents of young children. When mention of the nursery

appears, it becomes very difficult to portray Mayer as anything but a complete villain.

The nursery is a loaded term, a sign of her duplicity, and the stand-alone evidence that

Mayer is the enemy. Within the example of the nursery adheres the ideologically

powerful connotation that obliterated Mayer in the press. The rhetorical muscle of the

invocation of the nursery is unquestionable. If you are trying to argue that Mayer cares

little for the struggles of working families as evidenced by the telework ban, then this

nursery heaps insult to injury, rubbing her employee’s faces in the distinction between

them and her. Moreover, it reinforces the fact that Mayer is personally aware of just how

difficult it is for people to juggle career and family, and that one of the only mechanisms

to achieve work/life balance is to converge the two into shared spaces. Mayer’s nursery is

symbolic of the general critique of her in the press, as it represents both her privilege and

her hypocrisy.
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Conclusion

The story told in the news about Marissa Mayer was important because it came at

a crucial moment when mythologies circulating about flexible work in the knowledge

economy were entering the hegemonic order, and apparently nearing a point where it was

beyond debate. Stuart Hall has written about this concept extensively, incorporating and

extending Antonio Gramsci’s theories of ideology and hegemony to apply to all manner

of popular culture texts. Hall says that over time, ideas become hegemonic when they

presents themselves as the “traditional wisdom or truth for the ages,” when in fact they

are a product of historical processes (Hall, 1996, p. 431). This is the case for flexible

work, as many in the popular press saw its growth, at least until the Mayer ban, as

inevitable.

Many assumed the long term trend was for flexibility to increase as the benefits

piled up, but instead Mayer and her colleagues at Bank of America, Best Buy, Google,

and other giants, either ended their telework policies, or made public their desire to limit

flexible work schedules. So why then was Mayer so viciously attacked for her ban at

Yahoo, while these other CEOs received little, if any scrutiny for doing the same thing?

The answer to that question lies in the journalistic conventions that encouraged stories to

be told using elite persons as the focus, and manufacturing two sides of a debate in order

to maximize drama and conflict. The fact that Mayer was herself a working mother made

her telework ban appear more ironic and hypocritical than it did for the above mentioned

companies, all of which had male CEOs. This is indicative of the way in which these

journalistic conventions can have uniquely gendered repercussions. After all, the

expectation is for men to act in the interests of the companies they run, where a steadfast
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dedication to work over family had been a requirement for years. The articles that

showed support for Mayer and her position generally referenced this principle, making it

clear that work arrangements were organized according to commercial interests. It should

come as no surprise to us when the CFO of Google Patrick Pichette says that they have as

few teleworkers as they can get away with, and no one even asked if he, himself had

children (Grubb, 2013). Virtually all of the news stories that were critical of Mayer

mentioned that she was a mother, and used this to ground a critique of her policy, as

though she should be expected to institute policies that were contrary to profits but

favorable to families, when men were exempt from such expectations.

The criticism that Mayer received after the telework ban was troubling because it

demonstrated that not until a female CEO with children instituted a work policy that was

unfriendly to families were we able to start to understand that the interests of capital and

the interests of workers with children remain fundamentally at odds. However, this was

obfuscated by Mayer’s role as CEO and mother. Rather than blaming her, along with

every other CEO, for putting profits ahead of families, she was targeted for being a

mother who betrayed other working families, when a number of men escaped criticism

for doing the same thing.

For example, there were 148 articles that discussed Mayer’s telework ban, but in

an identical Lexis Nexus search of Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly, who ended the telework

policy at his company during the exact same period, yielded only five articles that

discussed changes to the company’s telework policy. A search of Bank of America CEO

Brian Moynihan, who ended his company’s telework policy in December of 2012, two

months before Mayer, turned up zero results in an identical search. Mayer reexamined the
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role of flexible work, a prevalent trend in her industry, in order to try and increase profits

and make her company more competitive. Her role was never to make the lives of her

employees with children easier, nor was it the role of the CEOs of other companies.

Perhaps some like Sir Richard Branson, CEO of Virgin, who called Mayer’s decision

“old school thinking,” were of the mind that flexible workplaces are superior to located

offices. However, if his workers suffered from the same low morale and stunted

productivity as was found at Yahoo when Mayer took over, one would not be surprised to

find his tune change abruptly, and perhaps in a way not unlike Mayer (El Akkad, 2013).

The debate about the future of telework – whether it produces good work and

happy employees, or whether it is more trouble than its worth – was encapsulated in the

press debate over Marissa Mayer’s telework ban. Articles that supported her position

remained fairly neutral towards her as a person, instead focusing almost exclusively on

her role as a CEO, except when referencing her critics, who made it clear that there was

an expectation that Mayer should act to support working families, and especially working

mothers, because she herself was a mother with a demanding job. The discussion in the

news mirrored the actual issue in a unique way. The dichotomy between Mayer’s

professional role and her family life was conflated by her critics, who were under the

impression that she, like every other working mom, would have no choice but to fulfill

multiple roles simultaneously: this would mean being a CEO and a mom, not just a CEO.

Being a mother would mean she would empathize with other working mothers, and

would not be so willing to make their plight more difficult. Her supporters, however,

ignored her position as a mother, arguing that as a CEO she had a tough decision to

make, and that was all that mattered.

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Three of the most heavily used terms in the sample convey crucial ideological

information about the stories. The term “flexibility” is an unqualified positive word. No

one wants to be associated with a lack of flexibility, to be labeled inflexible. Therefore, to

ban telework is to turn against flexibility, to prefer rigidity, hierarchy, structure, and

control. The popularity of this term helped to solidify in the minds of readers that Mayer

was an inflexible boss, an enemy of emerging workplace trends that favor worker

happiness. The “nursery” is similarly used, as it symbolizes the hypocrisy of Mayer. It

represents her class, her wealth, and her privilege, but more than that, it is evidence of the

unresolved contradictions between worker and capitalist in this relationship. And finally,

the term “perk” is deployed to reinforce the managerial position that telework is no more

a right of workers than smartphones are, and that expectations of such things are

symbolic of a growing selfish worker culture.

The fervor of debate over Marissa Mayer’s telework ban at Yahoo served to

reinforce the point that even a female CEO, herself the mother of small children, cannot

be relied upon to create corporate policies that protecting the personal familial interests of

her workers. If forced to weigh the work/life balance of her employees against increasing

profits and company success, any CEO, even a mother, has to sacrifice the former for the

latter. Anne-Marie Slaughter said it best when she wrote an article at the time of Mayer’s

ban defending the decision, saying “Marissa Mayer is a CEO first, and a woman second,”

freeing her from any responsibility for helping working mothers achieve work/life

balance (Slaughter, 2013). The criticism Mayer received originated from the double-bind

that places women in an untenable situation where, even those in positions of power are

under tremendous pressure to satisfy two conflicting needs simultaneously.

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If Mayer protected the work/life balance of her employees by refusing to institute

a telework ban, she may have been unable to put Yahoo back on course, and would have

been fired, much like her predecessors. It is entirely possible that she would have faced

public criticism that her sentimentality and maternal instincts prevented her from being a

shrewd enough CEO to make the tough decisions. If she forbade telework, she would be

publicly tormented for betraying her gender and destroying the working lives of her

employees, particularly working mothers. It was lose-lose for Marissa Mayer, a classic

double-bind, and not entirely unlike the one faced by many working women every day. If

they focus on work, they are guilty of neglecting their families, and if they focus on their

families, they are insufficiently committed or incapable of workplace success. Mayer’s

dilemma is analogous to that of her employees. She has to balance the familial

expectations of all of her employees, and also the pressure to succeed at her job.

Had she been a man, like any of the other CEOs who ended telework at the same

time, her gender and her familial status would have been a non-issue and she would have

been congratulated for making a tough, but fair decision. Under a capitalist system,

simply wishing and hoping for more flexible, family friendly policies is pointless at best,

given that all families are at the whim of capricious CEOs who’s first and only

responsibility to is to profits. Working under the assumption that the CEO of a billion

dollar tech company would ever truly consider sacrificing the solvency of a company

under her stewardship in order to allow her employees with family commitments to enjoy

a less stressful work/life balance, is an assumption that needs to be dispelled sooner

rather than later.

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The Flipside of Flexibility: Telework and the Myth of

Work/Life Balance

It is hard to deny the appeal of a flexible workplace. Flexible workplaces offer

freedom to work when and where a person chooses. If you prefer working in the

evenings, it is no problem. If you like to go to the gym in the middle of the day, that is

also fine. If something comes up unexpectedly, workers have the freedom to respond

quickly, without concern for bosses and schedules. Work is something that you do, not

somewhere you have to go. The opposite of flexible workplaces are something most

people are quite familiar with, as they were the norm for most of the twentieth century:

rigid, bureaucratic, hierarchical, and inflexible, with centralized control over the

workflow process. Labor was performed in core locations, close to resources and

management power structures. As we saw in the previous chapter, there is reason to

doubt whether the future of workplace organizing is going to include more flexibility.

The telework ban at Yahoo demonstrated that the value of workplace collaboration to

capital is substantial enough to warrant strong prohibitions on flexible working. This

chapter extends that discussion, but also questions whether telework is the best model for

achieving more work/life balance that is promised from greater flexibility.

Some companies hold that worker interaction is of such paramount importance as

to outweigh any of the benefits associated with telework. If this is indeed the trend, and

knowledge work is more likely to favor located employment than previously thought,

then what does this mean for the workers who are reliant upon flexible work

arrangements to achieve work/life balance? Is teleworking the ideal arrangement to create

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a more harmonious interaction between work and leisure, or should a shift back towards

located working be welcomed by working families? Located working may have

significant value for employers, but what is the value to workers of increased face-to-face

collaboration and social interaction with their peers? To address these questions, I

performed guided interviews with teleworkers in order to get the worker’s perspective on

issues of work/life balance. But first, let me provide a review of the literature specific to

how telework impacts the worker and his or her family.

Literature Review

This chapter is an assessment of the subjective experience of teleworkers, with a

focus on identifying and understanding the impact that telework has on the balance

between work and leisure time. In this short review of the literature, I will focus on

Ellison’s fifth and six categories: boundaries between work and home, and impact of

telework on the individual and the family (Ellison 1999, p. 339). One of the main

problems for teleworkers is the potential for overwork, which is often discussed within

Ellison’s fifth category of telework research: boundaries between work and home.

Several studies have revealed that even though many working people seek out flexible

arrangements to alleviate the stress of family commitments, teleworkers frequently put in

more hours than their office counterparts (Hill, Erickson, Holmes, and Ferris, 2010;

Noonan and Glass, 2012). Because telework obscures the boundary between work and

leisure, it can encourage workers to attend to child care and house work during the day,

pushing paid work into the evening, and thereby effectively eliminating any leisure time

(Kraut, 1989). It seems that telework arrangements may be very good at making workers

feel as though they are working less, when in reality they are working the same amount or
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more (Hill, Tranby, Kelly, and Moen, 2013).

The impact of telework on the individual and the family is where I hope to make

the most radical contribution with this project, especially with regard to the elusive

pursuit of work/life balance. There are two competing camps on whether or not work and

life can be balanced with telework. On the one hand there are scholars who claim that

telework is exactly what employees need in order to achieve the tenuous balance between

work and leisure (Jenson, 1994). And on the other hand, there are those who found that

telework erased the line between work and life, which had the opposite effect (Jones,

1997). Especially when one attempts to combine care of a dependent child or elderly

parent with telework, the possibility of experiencing balance between work and leisure all

but disappears (Christensen, 1993; Riley, 1994). The research thus far has been

unsatisfying on this topic; very few attempts have been made to reconcile the

contradictions that continue to appear. Other scholars have arrived at more nuanced

conclusions than the above research. For example, workers feel that they benefit from

having increased control over their remote work options, but also feel that they work too

much and cannot effectively balance work and leisure as a result (Hill et al, 1996). Strong

evidence indicates that the ‘flexibility’ of anytime work has been disastrous for Type-A

workaholic personalities who already struggle to balance work and leisure, but may be

acceptable for certain other personality types (Olson, 1988; Olson and Primps, 1984).

This is a major unresolved question in the literature, as the two competing camps

disagree on whether telework is the best-case scenario for bringing work/life balance to

employees, or whether it simply erodes the boundaries between work and leisure,

creating less balance. In this chapter, I will work to reconcile this issue by ascertaining
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what teleworkers themselves prefer about located working over teleworking, and pushing

them to consider what their ideal work arrangement would look like. Teleworker

overwork is a persistent problem as well, and the literature has not been able to fully

explain what it is about the telework arrangements that make overwork a persistent

problem, or what it is about located working that is preferable for employees. Both of

these issues I explore in this research.

Methodology

Defining teleworkers is not easy. As one researcher famously put it, identifying

teleworkers is akin to measuring a rubber band: “The results depend on how far you

stretch your definition” (Qvortrup, 1998, p. 21). One way to add some structure to the

stretched definition is to categorize teleworkers using the terminology developed by

Gareis, who delineates three groups of teleworkers: supplementary, alternating, and

permanent (Gareis, 2002). Supplementary teleworkers labor at home less than one day

per week, while alternating workers telework one day a week or more, and permanent

teleworkers work at home all or almost all of the time (Gareis, 2002). Therefore, I sought

out participants who self-identified as teleworkers, making it clear that they need not be

permanent, full-time teleworkers in order to qualify for the study.

In order to attract potential teleworkers to be interviewed, an ad was placed on

various social media sites such as Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter, asking for volunteers

(See Recruitment Advertisement). Fourteen people responded in total, all of whom were

interviewed. Eight of the respondents identified as men and six identified as women.

Eight of the participants had children and the other six had none. Seven of the

participants were married, three were in long-term committed relationships, two were in
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the process of divorcing, and two were single. The sample reflects a diversity of telework

options. Included in the sample were university professors (both tenure-track and

adjunct), lawyers and telemarketers, IT interns and IT managers, social media marketers

and environmental activists. People in all professions work by remote and define

themselves as teleworkers; a few do it every day and others as little as half a day per

week. But if a job does not absolutely require a worker to be in a specific place to

complete work tasks, for example a manufacturing assembly line or a bank teller, then

people can be found teleworking in that position.

The interview sample contained members of all three telework groups. Seven of

the fourteen interviewees were permanent teleworkers, in that they spend all of their work

time, or almost all of it, working from a home office. The other half of the sample was

either supplementary or temporary teleworkers, working barely a few days a week from

home. For example, one interviewee was an IT specialist for a small insurance company,

who said he frequently took off Friday afternoons and worked a few hours over the

weekend, when he could have uninterrupted access to the company’s IT networks.

According to Gareis’s schema, he would be a supplementary teleworker, working less

than one day a week from home. Another interviewee was an attorney who worked from

home only on Wednesdays in order to spend more time with his children; he would be

characterized as an alternating teleworker. All but two of the teleworkers interviewed for

this project had the option to work in an office if they chose, where they had dedicated

space set up for them (a cubicle or a personal office).

The study conforms to the requirements of the Canadian Tri-Council Policy on

Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans (2014) and was approved by Western’s
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Research Ethics Board in a delegated review (See Western’s Research Ethics Board

Approval). All participants gave free and informed consent (See Letter of Information

and Consent form) and pseudonyms are used throughout to protect participant

confidentiality. Interviews were conducted between July and December of 2014, and all

but one was conducted using videoconferencing software (the outlier took place in-

person). The interviews followed a loose, open-ended format in which I directed workers

to explain how they arranged their work and leisure time, and what they enjoyed and

disliked about remote work (See Interview Questions). I also asked them extensive

questions about the telework policies of their employers, with particular attention paid to

how their work is monitored by management. They were asked to explain if they had ever

experienced feelings of isolation and loneliness while working from home, and to

describe their ideal work/life balance scenario. Each interview lasted around one hour,

was recorded and then transcribed using notes taken during the interviews. Below is a

table (Table 1) showing the demographic breakdown of the fourteen participants.

Table 1
7 Alternating/Supplementary Teleworkers
7 Permanent Teleworkers

8 Men 6 Women

8 Had Children 6 Had No Children

7 Married, 3 in Long-Term Relationships 2 Divorced/Separated, 2 Single

2 Self-Identified as Having Same-Sex 12 Did Not State Sexual Orientation

Partners
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The methodology used to analyze the interviews is a grounded theory method.

Charmaz describes grounded theory as “systematic, yet flexible guidelines for collecting

and analyzing qualitative data to construct theories from the data themselves” (Charmaz,

2014, p. 1). The researcher constructs a theory “grounded in their data,” hence grounded

theory (Charmaz, 2014). Coding data in grounded theory is a three-step process. Initial

coding is the first step, which means that the researcher names sections of the data with a

label that “simultaneously categorizes, summarizes, and accounts for each piece of data”

(Charmaz, 2014, p. 111). At this stage, the researcher pays close attention to the emergent

principles, and is open to any and all theoretical possibilities that may be contained in the

data (Charmaz, 2014, p. 116). In the axial coding stage, the categories defined in the

initial coding are compared against each other to understand how they fit within the

category to which they have been placed, and how they differ from the other categories

(Corbin and Strauss, 1990, p., 13). The final stage is the focused or selective coding

stage, where the most frequently appearing or significant codes from the other stages are

used to “sort, synthesize, and conceptualize” the data as a whole (Charmaz and Belgrave,

2012, p., 356). At every stage, the researcher must make constant comparisons between

the new codes and themes, and the ones previously identified, in order to recognize and

account for anomalies, contradictions, and accuracy. “Making comparisons assists the

researcher in guarding against bias, for he or she is then challenging concepts with fresh

data” (Corbin and Strauss, 1990, p., 9). Explaining these core categories, how they

function, what they consist of, and using specific examples from the raw data, is the

ultimate function of this methodology.

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The interviews followed a predictable pattern, in that the participants discussed

what advantages telework offered them, and what drawbacks it contained. Therefore, the

results and discussion are separated into three sections that reflect this pattern. In the first

part, I examine what people generally liked about remote work; for example, why do the

informants telework, were they given a choice, how did the arrangement originate, what

do they like about the arrangement, and how is their work evaluated while working under

remote situations. In the second part, I focus on the downside of telework, such as its

limitations and disadvantages. In the third section, the findings are analyzed and a theory

explaining the data emerges.

“I’m In the Zone”: The Advantages of Teleworking

The goal of this research is to ascertain if telework actually increases work/life

balance, and also to determine what benefit collocated working has for employees. The

argument proffered by Marissa Mayer and other tech industry leaders is that collaboration

is good for business, but what do teleworkers think of this? To answer these questions,

interviewees were first asked questions that were intended to get them to explain the

details of their own unique telework scenarios. For example, they were asked how many

days a week they telework, how they structure their day, if they track their work hours,

and what they like most (and least) about remote work. These questions were also

intended to get the interviewees talking and thinking about their work arrangement prior

to being asked more complicated questions, such as “have you ever experienced isolation

while working at home?” or “Do you feel you work more or less while teleworking?”

The ability to focus, to work for long stretches of time without distraction, is the

single biggest advantage for teleworkers whose jobs favor uninterrupted time. Being in
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the zone, or in a flow, in other words working without distractions is one of the central

codes in the data. Frank is an IT intern, who does internal and external website building

for a company, said that it can be disheartening to have your workflow interrupted. “I’ll

be in the zone, I’ll have earbuds in, coding away, then someone comes to talk to me or

something will happen that will break everything. I’ll lose my train of thought and it

sucks.” Sam was a web security consultant that converted to permanent telework after

two years in the office, who said “the little interruptions that happen in an office, I find, I

was really underestimating how destructive they were.” “It takes me some time to get

back to where I was.” Coworkers and managers pose a risk of splitting worker attention

in different directions, which makes the main task more difficult and less enjoyable

because it takes time to get back into a mental state of work, and because having multiple

tasks to attend to is stressful. Cecil is a web applications manager who oversees a number

of employees, both teleworkers and located, who described the advantage this way:

The biggest reason that is great is giant chunks of time uninterrupted. For our
work, once you get in the zone it’s the most precious thing in the world. To have
anyone come over and interrupt you... our developers desk can’t call people, our
managers can’t call them. Part of my job is making sure that developers have
large, uninterrupted times of work on one thing. So that is what is gained, the
biggest advantage to not being here. That’s it, that’s the biggest advantage, period.
From a managerial standpoint, being distraction free means Cecil’s employees are

happier. “If you look at developer happiness, a lot of the time, it’s just no fun to work on

four different projects. It’s really hard.”

Some teleworkers felt they could only experience this level of uninterrupted, in-

the-zone work while at home, and others made it clear that home was the place in which

distractions were far more likely to be a problem. Not surprisingly, for the people with
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children, telework as a method of balance is treated with caution and skepticism,

especially if they occasionally work with children around. Ramona does part-time social

media work for a nonprofit while her son is in daycare four days a week. She said this

about working from home while her son is there: “it has to be short things, I can’t do

intensive work. But if I need to send a couple quick emails, or there’s an edit I need to do,

I can squeeze that kind of stuff in. I might do emails on my phone if he is a little

distracted and doesn’t need me.”

Mary, a tenure-track professor with two children, who teleworks one day a week,

echoed this point about mechanical work: “I try not to take on any projects that are going

to require intense and prolonged focus, or that have a strict deadline of the next day.” She

goes on to say that she usually prefers to manage the “mindless tasks” when her kids are

home with her. David, an attorney who teleworks one day a week to spend more time

with his children, claims that the more mentally taxing work is best left till the kids are

asleep. “I try to work when they… the more focused work, when they’re napping,

because if you can get them down to sleep for the afternoon, then I can just try to plug

away on my work.” Telework then, is not a universal solution for eliminating

interruptions to the work process. Or rather, the home is not always the best place to

avoid distractions.

The Dreaded Commute

After mitigating workflow distractions, which was cited by nine of the

participants, reducing a lengthy or stressful commute is the most frequently cited reason

to telework. Seven of the participants argued that saving time on commutes influenced

their decision to telework (or allow telework in Cecil’s case). Ramona explained “Part of
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the reason I telecommute is so that I get an extra hour a day, be that an extra hour to

work, or to do house stuff, that’s an hour I’m not in the car,” and when you have children

and other domestic tasks, you can’t afford to waste any time. “Your time is very

precious,” she says. But when you have children, “it focuses you a lot more. I get done

working and I go pick him up, and then it’s those few hours… that I have leisure time,

but then it’s spent doing housework and running errands.” For Ramona, the time crunch

of the day is too oppressive to waste an hour or more sitting idly in a car. Cy is an

environmental and political organizer who fought hard at her previous job to get a

telework arrangement, saying “My commute was really long, that’s why it was important

for me [to telework]. It was a 45 minute drive each way, which I despised.” Sam, who

works in Silicon Valley, said his commute used to be short by Bay Area standards, a

meager 30 minutes each way, but even that reduction is noticeable. “That affects my

leisure time,” he said. Cecil summed it up by saying telework does not really increase

leisure time, so much as it eliminates “time holes, like commutes, things that are totally

nonproductive.”

For those whose commute is an annoying 30 minutes per trip, saving 5 hours a

week is a fairly attractive incentive. For others, their job was located a hundred miles

away, or more, making telework the only way to keep working. Two of Cecil’s

employees were located too far to commute regularly. Allowing them to telework meant

he could retain quality talent, and keep that talent happy. “The fact that I can free up 4

hours of his week out of a car just to have him work from home is a no-brainer,” saying

of an employee who lived about 80 miles from the office and telecommuted 2 days a

week. Another of his employees was located in a completely different state, but Cecil
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fought to hire him anyway, arguing that he could not find equal talent in the city.

For Alica, who was a part-time telemarketer, her telework job was her second

income. She would work a standard, located 9-5 day job, and then come home to start her

telework job in the evening. “I would work until 5pm, and my job is about 4 kilometers

from my house. It’s pretty close, so I’d rush home and try to gobble down some food,

then start my [telework] job at 5:30.” This exhausting regime began as a way to pay

down some consumer debt with a part-time job, but she could not bear the thought of

working weekends because that would mean having no regular scheduled days off. Not

having a commute allowed her to avoid working weekends because the work started as

soon as she got home. George was a systems development consultant for a company in

Sweden, who was working from Canada while his partner attended graduate school. For

him, telework meant not having to try and find a new job in Canada. He got to keep his

seniority, benefits, vacation, and other perks. “The best thing is just that I could move to

Canada and still keep my job, no problems.”

“I can throw in a load of laundry:” Weaving in Personal

Productivity

Being able to telework means being able to occasionally participate in tasks that

normally would have to fit around a work schedule. The ability to weave personal errands

into the workday is another frequently cited code. Flexibility is really about maximizing

personal productivity. George says that he’s been “exercising during lunch,” which could

be done when working from the office, “but it’s much more difficult from the office.”

Stephen, a purchasing manager, said that teleworking allows him to easily attend to

errands and engagements that cannot usually be done after work hours. “I’m having a
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countertop put in my home,” he said, so he called his boss and asked to work from home

that morning, planning to come into the office after the contractors were finished. “As

long as I don’t have any important meetings, and I get my stuff done,” it is not an issue.

For Cy, working from home allows her to walk her dog, which is good exercise

and relaxing. She goes on, “I can just go in the kitchen and throw together leftovers for

lunch; I can do a load of laundry.” Dana, a manager in a purchasing department at a

heavy machinery factory, said it allowed her to pick her kids up and take them to the

doctor. She too suggests that doing laundry in the middle of the day is a significant bonus

of remote work. “Throwing in a load of laundry takes no more time than if I’m walking

down the hallway and person stops me to ask me about my weekend.” Ramona said that

her lunch break might involve, “throwing in a load of laundry, and running to the grocery

store.” Doing laundry is a popular activity for teleworkers. It operates as a substitute term

for the mundane domestic tasks that telework allows you to do during the workday, rather

than after work. Telework allows people to double their productivity by doing laundry (or

grocery shopping, or going to the doctor) without having to wait until they enter their

personal leisure time in the evening.

When asked to describe what they like most about teleworking, why they chose to

do it, or what they would miss about it, one answer kept appearing. People enjoy working

under circumstances where interruptions and general losses to productivity can be

avoided or eliminated. Telework is a fairly solid solution to this problem. If you do not

have children at home at least, telework can minimize spontaneous disruptions. It can

also allow for prolonged focused attention, it can eliminate lengthy (or impossible)

commutes, and it can make time available for other tasks, such as laundry, exercise, and
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banking to be woven into the day more seamlessly. When scholars have recorded that

teleworkers report being more productive, it is possible that workers merely mistake their

own productivity in non-work tasks for increased productivity overall.

The spontaneous collaboration that happens when coworkers interrupt each other,

or chat around the water-cooler, or simply bump into each other in the halls, is precisely

the type of interactions that teleworkers say they like to avoid. Perhaps this is because to

workers, these interactions are not productive. But at least some employers, like Yahoo,

have signaled that they see these interactions very differently.

The Professional, Social, and Psychological Downside to

Telework

In spite of the considerable, albeit subjective boost to personal productivity that

my participants described as coming along with teleworking, both teleworkers and their

managers recorded a number of drawbacks. In this section, we will explore the rationale

for why both teleworkers, and those who manage them, occasionally prefer working in

traditional located office settings. Or rather, what might be the factors that contributed to

limiting teleworking? The responses in this section came after interviewees were asked if

there was any resistance by their management apparatus to them teleworking, or if their

remote work program was ever abused by fellow coworkers. They were asked what they

would change about their remote work program if they could make a change, and also

asked if they saw themselves continuing to work by remote in the future. All told,

managers and teleworkers were in agreement on the assessment of the downside of

teleworking.
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Out of the Flow: Latency in operations and complicating

simple work tasks

One of the major reasons workers dislike remote environments is it inhibits

certain tasks that are made easier by being physically located in the same place. One of

the codes then is that telework often adds difficulty to tasks that were once completed

without much trouble. It complicates simple work operations. For example, employee

training, or learning new tasks, is easier when there are people around to assist and

answer questions. Frank the IT intern said that he prefers to spend as much time in the

office as he can while he is still learning the job. He described it this way:

It’s very helpful to have other people in the office. If I have a problem, or
something’s going wrong I can easily talk over something, ask for help. I’m new,
I gotta learn more systems, learn how the business grows.
Telework has a built-in latency to the communication between coworkers and networks

that is frustrating. Frank said that when working from home, it can take several seconds

or longer for updates on his work to populate, which when he is trying to get a project

done before the day is over, it can mean having to take himself out of the flow and pick

up a project the next day.

David says he avoids trying to communicate with coworkers while he is

teleworking. “I try to do things that don’t necessarily require collaboration.” As someone

who supervises employees and legal aides at the law firm, he reiterated the point that

training and managing is a social exercise that does not translate well to remote locations.

“I don’t think I’d have as good of a working relationship as I do with people right now,”

he said when asked if he was interested in taking on more telework in the future. Sam, the

web security analyst spent two years getting acquainted with the nuances of his job
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before switching to a telework arrangement. He cited having access to his trainer as the

main reason for wanting to be around the office for the first several months, and one of

the drawbacks to going to remote work. “Now that I’m teleworking, it means typing at

her, sending her an IM, sending her an email,” which takes more effort because it is “not

in the regular flow of things I have to do.”

Communication technology, such as email, instant-message, videoconferencing

equipment or software, and telephones make telework possible, but most teleworkers find

them to be an insufficient long-term replacement for face-to-face communication.

Ramona’s company is primarily teleworkers, although there is an office where workers

can gather, most of the employees and board members are scattered throughout the

United States. She was new to her job when interviewed, and so getting information from

coworkers who were not in a position to respond for several hours created many

frustrations for her. In the office, she gets quick answers to questions, as well as a long

history of why a certain thing work the way they do. “It’s a 28 year old nonprofit, there’s

so much history and sometimes when I ask a question, there’s a ten minute response even

though the actual answer is 30 seconds because I get the whole history of why they do

something the way they do.” This is an important and rewarding component of working

at her company, she said, but you do not get that when you instant message or email each

other.

Some technology is better for remote communication than others.

Videoconferencing for example, is perhaps the most advanced technology associated

with remote work, but teleworkers in the sample found it to be more trouble than it’s

worth. Stephen said that they have videoconferencing rooms to use with teleworkers in
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his office, but everyone avoids using them. David made the same point, saying everyone

in his office prefers phone calls or instant-message to communicate with remote workers.

George, whose entire operation is in Sweden, attempted to have video chat software open

with his team all the time in order to feel more physically connected to them. He

describes the experiment:

That didn’t work, we almost never use it now, we just use messaging or just voice
phone. Or Skype with just a voice on. It’s not a natural situation to sit in front of
the camera with your face, being filmed; it didn’t work. That’s not how you talk
to someone either, with your face looking directly at theirs. You get better
connection if you only use voice, that’s our feeling. You get a normal connection;
you talk and work. It’s not like 100% taking your attention, this video thing.

On the other hand, Cecil said all of their meetings use video for the remote workers in

order to make up for their physical absence. “I try to get as much in-person, but at least I

see [the teleworkers] every day on the video screen. They’re always videoed, never just a

phone call.” Stella, a software development engineer whose entire company is virtual,

said she opts for video before phone calls, but tries to meet up with local coworkers

whenever it is convenient. Video conferencing technology and software, although

occasionally useful especially for permanent teleworkers, can be cumbersome and

awkward.

Increased distance and non-standardized work schedules also create latency for

teleworkers. For example, remote communication can actually be an impediment to

productivity and efficiency because it presents a delay where one does not usually exist if

employees work together. Frank said that working by remote means dealing with

technological delays that really add up. “I’m 80 miles away, sometimes there’s a delay of
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a couple of seconds, which is really frustrating.” Technological delays aside though, there

is also latency in having to wait for other coworkers to respond to a question, or provide

approval. Cy is in a different time zone than many of her coworkers, which means getting

approval or answers can mean burning through her work hours just waiting for someone

else to get back to her.

I think, “I have this idea, I’m going to write it in an email, and I’m going to wait
the next two hours and see what everyone thinks about that.” And there’s also
those times when I need something and the person is not working, so I have to
wait for them to get to work… When I’m in the office, I can get what I need when
I need it.

This can be demoralizing for employees, who have successfully eliminated “time holes”

such as commuting, only to have it replaced with new time wasters specific to telework,

such as waiting around for updates, or for coworkers to respond to issues and questions.

The disconnection from the professional discourse at a workplace can be a major

issue when teleworking. For George, time stopped when he left his home country for

Canada and began teleworking. He describes it this way:

I know what we’re doing in the project, but I don’t know what’s happen in a
general sense. What are people doing, where are we going professionally? When
I’m at the office, I can always have my eye on the future, or it looks like these
projects are coming in, this is where we’re going and what we’re doing. You feel
like you’re wasting a little a bit, a part of the thing about having a job, you’re
missing out on it.

Professional Repercussions of Teleworking

Being disconnected from the work discourse in this way can have professional
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repercussions as well. The negative toll teleworking may have on people’s careers was

another of the codes in sample. Stephen said that there is a belief amongst his coworkers

that a person needs to be seen working if they want to advance their career. When asked

why an employee who does good work by remote would find it difficult to advance their

career, Stephen said, “you can be a stellar performer, but if you’re not in the office,

building the relationships, it’s gonna be more of a challenge. That’s just the breaks.”

Upper management does not explicitly say that working from home will hurt your career,

in fact at Stephen’s work place, they strive to give the opposite impression because “they

want people to enjoy their work/life balance.”

When Stephen was asked if he thought this system of surreptitiously punishing

teleworkers might be unfair to women with children, he replied that it does. It was

obvious this bothered him, so he tried to clarify that it might not be the case at every

workplace. “I’m in a silo of a silo within this company so I can only speak to that, but

from what I know, working there, I’ve been there 8 years. I would definitely say that

there is still an unwritten thing, it’s not going to be looked down upon, but it’s not gonna

get you to the next echelon.” It appears that telework comes at a professional cost,

especially for women with children who do not see telework as an option.

At Stephen’s work place, telework is permitted, but it is widely known that too

much remote work limits a person’s ability to advance their career. In other workplaces,

managerial resistance to telework is more overt. Part of the problem is that remote

workers are believed to be unaccountable. Managers at Stephen’s office can, and often

do, monitor the activities of workers by observing indicators built into instant-messenger

software. “If someone walks away from their computer, their status changes… [we] can
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see if they are doing laundry, doing TV, by their status being orange for four hours.” Sam

agrees, even though his employer is more supportive of teleworking overall. “There is a

feeling in the office that these people [teleworkers] are out of hand, like they’re away,

who knows what they’re doing, when they turn in their reports, but they’re not really

here. They’re not a part.”

The belief that teleworkers are unaccountable is so widespread that it can be

difficult for some workers to get a flexible arrangement approved because it can lead to

animosity between those who telework and their located coworkers. Cy encountered

resistance from her employer because of what she described as a “conservative work

culture.” Employees who had been at her job for longer than she had believed that “when

you’re not in the office, you’re not working.” For Sam, this was especially true with his

trainer, who felt that teaching was an ongoing, mutual process among all employees. In

both cases, there were located workers who complained to managers that it was unfair to

pay people to telework when their productivity could be measured against their located

counterparts.

Teleworking and Overworking

The belief that teleworkers are constantly slacking off might be common, but

there is little evidence in these interviews to suggest it is actually true. In fact, the

opposite seems more likely to be the case, in that teleworkers are more likely to

overwork, which is an important theme in the data. “The challenge for me, certainly in

this environment, is regulating how much I work,” said Stella, who is a permanent

teleworker. In practice, she says she tries to keep a 9-5 schedule, but flexibility means

working until the job is done. There are no formal requirements to work nights or
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weekends, but the work is there to be done all the time. “It’s just having that flexibility

means it’s much, much more difficult to place restrictions on the amount you’re working.

It’s like the opposite problem of the standard workplace, in a lot of ways.” When asked

what she meant by this, Stella argued that in a located workplace, there are structures and

rhythms that determine your maximum work output for the day, such as commute times,

lunch breaks, schedules, closing time, meetings, and coworker interaction. But in a

telework environment, “there really aren’t pieces of structure that would necessarily say,

‘you’ve been here, you’ve worked for 40 hours, it’s time for you to go home.’ Because

you are home.”

Cy, Sam, and George, the other permanent teleworkers in the sample, echoed this

anxiety about the potential for overwork, and expressed the need to set a strict time

boundary in order to keep from working long into the night or on weekends. As Cy put it,

“That’s actually one of the things that telework really invites, is spending way more time

at the office than if you were actually going in to an office. I don’t do that, I make a very

pointed practice of not doing that, unless I absolutely have to.”

Permanent teleworkers appear to be more aware of the potential for overwork,

and take steps to mitigate it, while alternating and supplementary teleworkers seemed

oblivious to the risk of overwork. Dana said that she liked to work in the evening after

her children were in bed. When asked if she considered this telework, she responded with

surprise that she had not thought about it that way before. “Good question. I guess so

because I’m still doing my work, my normal work away from my physical work location.

Would I have driven to the office to do that same work that I’m doing in from of my TV

in my jammies? No.” When asked how much he worked away from the office, in
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addition to the standard 40 hours, Stephen seemed genuinely incapable of determining it.

“If I’m home after 5pm, a lot of time I’m working on stuff, maybe 10%, 20%?”

Ramona is responsible for social media, which means there is pressure to be

participating in a sphere that does not conform to 9-5 schedules. When a major news

story broke over a weekend, she went to work, even though nobody told her she had to. “I

felt compelled to be involved… I wanted to be able to respond to things in a timely

manner. My free time was spent on social media that week.” For these teleworkers, there

is an expectation that you use the available technology to log a few hours of extra work

from home, in addition to the time already spent in a physical location. And because it

falls outside the standard work time, or workplace, they do not easily register it as real

work.

“I get to have my Christmas Party in my kitchen!:”

Telework and Isolation

Professional isolation is a problem for some of the teleworkers interviewed, but it

mainly affected those who teleworked most: either permanent or heavy alternating

teleworkers. Its importance as a theme in the data is undeniable, as the repercussions

appear the most serious for this factor. When they had no office to go to, no regular social

interaction with physically located coworkers, teleworkers were at risk of becoming

professionally ineligible from promotions and disengaged from the day-to-day business.

It became clear during the interviews that there was a significant social

component to this professional isolation that was, I argue, an even bigger problem. For

example, Sam’s trainer and office manager, both of whom were not permitted to

telework, led him to believe that what they really enjoyed most was simply “being in the
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office, having all the people there,” he said. “[The office manager] is always baking

cakes, bringing them in,” and moreover, “having people not in the office deprives her of

her ability to maintain a community in the office.” For some who prefer office

environments, allowing telework denies them of the camaraderie of shared experiences

that accompany mandatory located working. When asked what the biggest drawback to

teleworking was, or what he or she would change if they could, every single interviewee

said that it is the feeling of isolation that comes from working alone.

Psychologically, this type of social isolation can be quite dangerous. Dana said

that she is prone to introversion, and if she was not forced to be social amongst

coworkers, she might find herself retreating into solitude. This would be a major problem

for her: “I don’t think that’s good for me psychologically. I think people need other

people, whether we want to admit it or not, we want to be with each other, our own kind.”

Ramona said that she could go for days without talking to anyone but her toddler and her

partner, which can be maddening after a week or so. It makes her jealous of people that

get to have expansive social connections with work friends. Sarcastically, she said “I get

to have my Christmas party in my kitchen.”

Stella, who was perhaps the staunchest defender of telework, said “there’s not a

lot I miss about working in a located office.” But the thing she did miss was “being able

to form the types of relationships with my coworkers that tended to lead to socializing

outside of the workplace.” She claimed to have formed good, friendly relationships with

colleagues; however they mostly stuck to work related chats. The problem she said is that

the spontaneity is gone. “If you’re going to do things with colleagues after work for those

that live close, it can’t be spontaneous. It’s structured, you have to plan ahead.” And
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when that is the case, social interaction becomes too big of a chore. “The ease of having

that interaction at the end of the day, when everyone is leaving work – that is the good

opportunity to get together and do something spontaneously.” While explaining this, it

was clear that Stella missed this spontaneous social interaction more than she initially

realized. When asked if the lack of spontaneous social interactions was what led to her

overworking, she agreed that it was possible. “Turning off work in some sense does lead

to turning off the social group, the social network. It’s true.”

Richard was an adjunct professor in an online university in the United States, who

said that he desperately needed to explore volunteer opportunities in order to combat the

loneliness and isolation of remote work. “I have two volunteer jobs now that I do, just so

that I can meet people and talk to people,” he said. For him, there was no question that

the isolation he experienced while teleworking directly resulted in his desire to engage

with his community in this way. As a graduate student and lecturer, Richard was involved

in a community of scholars and students with whom he felt he could engage in

spontaneous leisure activities, but once he completed his degree and moved to a new city,

the fact that he was no longer required to appear physically at a workplace had quick and

devastating effects on his mental well-being. He recorded having debilitating anxiety

attacks and was diagnosed with depression.

To conclude, the interviews revealed a considerable dark side of teleworking.

Interviewees felt that teleworking made certain tasks more difficult, things that used to be

easy are now a problem: asking questions of coworkers, receiving instructions, or taking

advantage of a more sophisticated technological network, are all complications specific to

teleworkers. Communicating with and between remote workers is easy enough, as most
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workers do not find it to be inhibiting, although videoconferencing software and

technology is considered largely inadequate. A major drawback of teleworking is the

disconnection that comes with not being visible in the workplace. This has two potential

repercussions. On the one hand, it can be personally and professionally unsatisfying to be

disconnected from the culture of the workplace. Discussing issues with coworkers,

solving problems, and participating in office events, are contributors to heightened

personal engagement. Moreover, this absence from work culture can mean that

employees are sometimes overlooked for career advancement. Promotions have as much

to do with office politics as they do with job performance, making the choice, or need, to

telework potentially very costly.

The interviews showed that many of the informants’ workplaces were still

wrestling with the belief that workers must be under direct supervision if they are to be

expected to produce, and since teleworkers are not directly supervised, it is believed that

they must be shirking responsibilities. As a result, some workplaces limit telework to as-

needed situations, or they monitor teleworkers more closely in an attempt to mitigate

animosity between located workers and teleworkers. This assumption about the duplicity

of the wily teleworkers is problematic, primarily because telework appears to invite

overwork rather than underwork. The lack of work structure and the remote connection

capabilities means that employees are never without the technological capacity, and the

professional compulsion, to be working. Finally, the biggest problem cited by

interviewees was the social isolation that comes from teleworking. The fact that when

teleworking, it is easy to go for prolonged periods of time with very little human contact,

is a troubling dynamic of this work arrangement, and one in which virtually all the
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interviewees were aware.

Conclusions: “It’s like having shackles on you all the time.”

This research project sought to discover if telework is the ideal scenario for

workers to achieve work/life balance. What is fascinating about these interviews is that

flexibility, for the most part, was seen by teleworkers as a minor advantage, a

convenience at best. This is far from the life-altering paradigm shift advocates of

work/life balance through telework claim it to be. George argued that he liked being able

to take a jog in the middle of the day, although he said he could do that from the office,

too. And Cy expressed her affinity for a mid-day dog walk. Ramona was able to keep her

son out of day care one day a week, which saved them a few hundred dollars each month.

David was able to spend a few extra days each month with his children. Dana could take

her kids to a doctor’s appointment, or throw in a load of laundry. While these benefits of

telework should not be overlooked, they represent only modest mitigations of the

conspicuous lack of balance modern workers experience. There are some advantages to

telework scenarios, but work/life balance is not large amongst them.

The attraction of telework, and presumably the reason that it is suggested as a

mechanism for increasing balance, is that it allows workers to prevent work tasks from

taking up all the usable time in the day, every day. Teleworkers are free to take a walk in

the middle of the day, do laundry, make appointments, go shopping, even spend time

with children, all while technically at work. In this sense, the term ‘flexibility’ means

having the ability to attend to non-work obligations during work hours, which is no doubt

an attractive feature of telework – but unfortunately, the opposite is also true. This

flexibility means having the ability to attend to work obligations during non-work hours,
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as well. While it appears as though employers are slow to adopt telework, in reality

managers simply wish to maximize worker output, which can mean having workers put

in a full day at the office first, where they can be monitored and evaluated, and then

setting them free to work from home as much as they wish, always ensuring there is more

work to be done.

The flipside of flexibility is that you may be expected to work, or required to

work, or feel indirect pressure to work, even when you do not want to. As George made

clear in his interview, employers make a big deal out of giving workers unprecedented

levels of freedom to work anywhere and anytime they wish, but this ends up being a

burden, a compulsion to work all the time, no matter where you are or what you are

doing. “You could be working right now, on the beach,” he says of how his and other

employers discuss telework. “It would be much better if I can’t work right now, because

I’m on the beach.” “It’s like having shackles on you all the time,” he said.

Employers invest in technologies that make it possible for their workers to have

remote connectivity, allowing them to work at night and on the weekends, after the

standard workday is done. Employers, even the ones who are reluctant to allow full-scale

telework, see no problem with workers telecommuting on their free time. As Dana

became aware, she would not have driven to work after putting her kids to sleep, but

often attends to work tasks while watching television in the evenings. Her realization

points towards the fact that telework is not really a problem for employers, as they

actively encourage it, so long as it happens after workers have already put in the requisite

workday or workweek.
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True freedom does not come from flexibility then, but from the opposite: from the

concept that work can only be done during certain times, and at specific places. While

working for a client with sensitive security needs, George was required to complete all

work on-site, inside of a high security zone. He was not allowed to discuss details of the

job, or do any related work outside of that space, but he remembers the experience

fondly. “It was such a liberating experience,” he said, because when he was not in that

zone, he did not have to think about work. “The ability to not work remotely is such a

freedom, because I’m so free when I go out of the office.” Flexibility is a catchall term

for reduced structural pressure to complete paid work tasks during specific times and at

designated spaces, which is attractive to workers who are often pulled in many directions

at once.

While the structural pressure may decrease in telework scenarios, the indirect

pressure to work more, to work harder, to sacrifice free time for work time, to never let

work slip out of mind, increases dramatically. The freedom to work anytime ends up

manifesting itself as an expectation to work all the time. It should come as no surprise

that eliminating the boundary between work and leisure would lead to less, not more,

balance between the two. Stella had unlimited and unstructured vacation at her job, but

found that she took less vacation than she did when she had a set amount of days every

year. “I think I did take more vacation time when it was structured. I made sure to take 3-

4 weeks vacation, but now there’s not the same type of pressure to use it before you lose

it.” During the interview, she estimated that she took two weeks of vacation in the last

year and a half, but could not remember how much vacation time she had actually used in

the last two years.

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Balance between work and leisure also means having enough free time to engage

in social activities. In Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, he details

four types of alienation under capitalism. In the fourth type, called social alienation, it’s

assumed that Marx meant that workers are forever forced to confront other workers as

competitors (Ollman, 1971, p. 148). As a result, social isolation is often associated with

prolonged periods of time spent at a workplace, rather than away from it. This project

complicates the accepted Marxist view that has long argued that waged labor is an

alienating experience in itself. This research suggests that the experience of working

alongside other people plays an important social role for us, and the lack of it can have

disastrous effects on our mental health. The teleworkers interviewed for this project

reported that spontaneous social interaction with coworkers was extremely enjoyable to

them personally, professionally, and emotionally, and the loss of it while teleworking was

the single biggest reason to consider working in an office with other people. Even the

interviewees who are permanent teleworkers describe the lack of social interaction as the

only thing that would compel them to accept a located office job again.

An undervalued side effect of located working is the propensity for workers to

cultivate personal relationships with their coworkers. Work has an important social

function, which is jeopardized under telework scenarios. In The Great Good Place, Ray

Oldenburg developed the theory of the “third place,” which are the coffee shops, bars,

community centers, main street shops, or other social hubs that are the foundation for a

thriving democracy (Oldenburg, 1989). These places have a number of things in common

that make them attractive spaces for citizens looking to recharge depleted social batteries.

It is called the “third place” because it is neither home nor work—the first and second
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places respectively—but the “other” place that a person goes to experience social or

cultural life (Oldenburg, 1989, p. 14).

The problem, according to Oldenburg, is that North Americans no longer have

any spaces that serve as this third place, and our emotional and civic lives are suffering as

a result. Worse yet, in the absence of opportunities to frequent such places, citizens often

rely on their workplaces to satisfy their need for spontaneous social conversation. The

coffee break and the water cooler conversation are frequent, although imperfect fill-ins

(Oldenburg, 1989, p. 12). If you are a teleworker, then your workplace is also your home,

and so not only are you without a “third place,” a space for social communitarian

interaction, but you also do not have the “second place.” Under a telework scenario, we

just have the home, which is the workplace, the leisure space, and the social space all

collapsed together.

Given the findings of this undertaking, it is hard to conclude that telework

facilitates anything resembling balance. Indeed, some tangible improvements to the

maximization of leisure time are possible in telework scenarios, but they are largely

subjective and undeniably modest. The conclusion of this project is that work/life balance

cannot be achieved through “flexibility” because there are two sides to flexibility in the

workplace. Certainly there are more opportunities to take the dog for a walk or wait

around for the cable installer to arrive, but it comes at a heavy cost. The sensation that

you could always be doing work is a constant, oppressive feeling that many workers

argue is always there. It leads to overwork, and an inability to enjoy leisure activities due

the anxiety that work needs to be done. As Marx famously said about the worker: “He is

at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home” (Marx,
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1988). Workers need a clear separation between the spheres of labor and leisure;

otherwise the former colonizes the latter. Work and leisure cannot exist in the same place

at the same time.

If we include social needs in work/life balance, then telework further impedes our

ability to achieve harmony. For example, spontaneous disruptions are what we hate most

about working with other people, and what we miss most when we no longer have them

around. On the one hand, this illustrates that work tasks, actual work, is more enjoyable

when it is uninterrupted. But this too, comes at a price. Not having coworkers around to

interrupt your work tasks also means that they are no longer around to have lunch with,

or to socialize with after work, or to help solve unforeseen problems, or simply to

commiserate with.

In conclusion, if we truly seek to achieve more balance between work and leisure,

then I would argue the answer is quite obvious. Assuming that the relationship between

work and leisure is in disequilibrium, then we have to conclude that we are devoting too

much time to one of these spheres, and I doubt anyone believes we are spending too

much time at leisure. Therefore, a wholesale reduction in hours spent working, and a

more distinct boundary between work and home is the only real way for workers to

achieve balance. Programs that promote workplace flexibility are nothing more than

managerial efforts to circumvent this obvious solution. It allows workplaces to justifiably

claim that they are prioritizing employee health and happiness by allowing flexibility,

while at the same time ensuring that work output stays the same, or even increases.
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Conclusion

This dissertation project interrogates the ways in which the concept of flexible

work had been fetishized in telework discourses, specifically around how workers in the

global north are expected to arrange their work and family live if they wanted balance

between the two. This fetishization is based on a set of assumptions that telework is a

natural feature of creative post-Fordist work environments, and that flexible workplaces

are better for both employees and employers. The rigidity of the Fordist work

environment, characterized by strict adherence to shifts and schedules, located working,

and ruthless Taylorist oversight of the work flow process, is presumed to be replaced in

the post-Fordist environment with flexibility in when, where, and how work is to be

completed. But is this accurate, and if it is, what are the implications of such a shift?

The broad goal of this project was to investigate if telework to see if it indeed

operated within the post-Fordist mode of production as its promotional rhetoric

suggested, and to critically examine if telework and flexibility are beneficial to workers.

A mixed methodology combined several different perspectives on telework that

addressed these questions. It distinguished capital’s interest in telework from that of the

workers' experience, which was contrasted with press representations of remote work.

The findings are that flexible tele-workplaces are not as inevitable as once

thought, and even in such workplaces, they bring some significant disadvantages for

working families. What follows is an overview and reflections on each of the chapters in

this project, followed by a summary of what I believe to be the major implications of my

research, of the potential avenues it opens up for future scholars, and, finally, my

recommendations for the future of teleworking.

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Chapter Reflections

The first chapter is a political economic analysis of telework, focusing on the cost

and benefits to workers and employers in an attempt to understand why companies such

as Google, Facebook, and Yahoo would resist remote work, unless of course there was a

financial downside that we were failing to see. In this chapter, I discovered that

employers gain by instituting a telework policy primarily because they have capital

invested in overhead, real estate, and employee development, and these are the areas in

which telework is most likely to show steady, predictable economic benefits. The

analysis also showed that workers in a telework situation may be breaking even at best,

financially. This challenges the prevailing mythology that telework is mutually beneficial

to workers and employers. In many cases, workers are being put into precarious

situations where their employer has no responsibility for workplace safety and mental

health; the burdens are going to be borne by workers themselves.

The surprising finding of this chapter is that we may have to reconsider whether

flexible work arrangements will be the norm in work environments of the future.

Technology companies like Google and Yahoo do not allow it, citing an inability to

manage the work process and a loss of spontaneous interaction between coworkers.

While it may be possible in the future to have more sophisticated technology for

monitoring workers, the unique product of spontaneous human interaction—an

undeniably profitable quality—may never be adequately reproduced, which means that

telework may forever be limited. The inability of managers to oversee the workflow

process, and the distinctive consequence of unstructured workplace collaboration are two
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factors that are so integral to the profitability that they may keep telework checked

indefinitely.

The second chapter is a discourse analysis of news stories discussing Yahoo CEO

Marissa Mayer’s February 2013 decision to end telework. This is the first discourse

analysis of telework coverage in the popular press. The selection of Marissa Mayer as a

focus of this analysis arose from a pragmatic need to narrow my research, but Mayer’s

telework ban was much more than a convenient choice for this study. Mayer's ban was

current, and it generated a lot of news content, but most importantly it was the major

vehicle through which debates about work/life balance, gender, and flexibility took place

in the media. The Yahoo ban was unique in that it was really not unique at all, except for

in the way in which the event was represented in the popular press, and the degree of

attention it generated.

The analysis produced a number of findings. First, Mayer’s defenders in the press

focused on the argument that she offered for ending telework, evaluating it and extending

it as they saw fit. Her critics focused much more on her role as a woman and a mother,

arguing that she had failed to protect the interests of other working families by ending

telework. This illuminated a double-bind for Mayer, which applies more widely to

women working in demanding careers. Mayer was under pressure to fulfill contradictory

roles, rendering any decision she made subject to negative consequences. If she ended

telework, she was accused of betraying her gender and being out of touch with the needs

of poor, working families. If she failed to end telework, even though she believed it

would improve her business, she would be accused of lacking the toughness required to
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be a CEO. The media would have depicted her as too maternal, too sensitive, and thus not

well suited for business.

I call the above scenario the “Working Mother Double Bind”: ultimately, the

interests of capital and the interests of families are at odds, which means that women

trying to balance careers and family will be continually subject to conflicting pressures,

both of which have negative consequences that characterize them as either too devoted to

their careers and insufficiently devoted to families, or too emotionally invested in their

maternal responsibilities to be successful at work. What telework ultimately does in this

scenario is place the blame on women for being incapable of achieving the correct

balance between work and children, and ignore the structural barriers women face in

trying to reconcile this imbalance.

The news media is principally responsible for priming citizens to respond to and

evaluate political and cultural decisions (Iyengar & Kinder, 1987, p. 63). It performs an

"agenda setting" role: citizens place importance on issues that the media has deemed

important (McCombs and Shaw, 1972). By setting the agenda, the media makes certain

issues salient, and also instructs audiences as to the standards to be used in evaluating

them (Scheufele and Tewksbury, 2007, p. 11). That Marissa Mayer’s telework ban

garnered more media coverage than other similar bans illustrates that the media felt that

hers was more significant than the others. When we examine why that might be, it is

obvious that the fact that she is a woman is the aspect that sets her apart from the other

CEOs who have implemented telework bans. The criteria by which Mayer was judged

were different as well. Where other leaders of industry were forgiven for putting profits
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ahead of working families, Mayer was not so fortunate. The media used a different

standard to evaluate Mayer’s telework ban, a standard that is overtly sexist.

The third chapter is a series of in-depth interviews with a variety of teleworkers,

each with unique arrangements and diverse professions. Fourteen teleworkers were

interviewed, with occupations ranging from part-time telemarketer to tenure track

professor. The questions were broken up into four categories: one devoted to general

questions, one to family and leisure activities, one on financial questions, and one on

surveillance and evaluation. The interviewees offered insight into their own telework

arrangements, including their reasons for teleworking, how their work is evaluated, and

what role economics played in their decision to remote work. The results allowed me to

develop a broad theory that exposes and explains one of the key drawbacks to telework

scenarios: worker isolation.

The insistence by tech company giants like Google that worker interaction is vital

to creative labor is supported by the interviews of teleworkers, who contend that the

biggest disadvantage to working from home is reduced social interaction with their

coworkers. Several interviewees said they deliberately limit their telework hours because

the social connection to coworkers is so important to them professionally, socially, and

psychologically. This illuminates a contradiction: workers view this spontaneous social

interaction as a byproduct of being at work, and some employers it would seem view this

as an integral component of the work itself. Theorists working in the tradition known as

'autonomist Marxism' are well-known for advocating that working class resistance

“precedes and prefigures the transformations of the capitalist modes of production”

(Read, 2003, p. 13; Weeks, 2011, p. 93-94). I contend that employers are resistant to
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telework because they see an opportunity to capture the value that is created when

workers are engaging in social activities on work time. In other words, it is not capital’s

creativity that drives innovation in methods for capturing value, but rather the

resourcefulness of working class resistance to capital that forces capital’s response. The

improved mental health that comes from workers being around each other, even if they

are not working at the time, not only benefits the workers themselves, but is converted

into a valuable asset to the companies.

The Struggle over Moments: Common Threads Between

the Chapters

The thread that ties all three of these chapters together is that while telework is

often seen as an unqualifiedly positive arrangement for workers, my research exposes the

problems with this assumption. Failure to interrogate flexible work has caused academics

to overlook the disadvantages that telework actually presents for workers in the post-

Fordist labor environment. For example, the widely held belief that because a job is

technologically suited for telework, employees can expect the freedom to telework they

desire, is incorrect. The abrupt telework ban at Yahoo, the limited telework options at a

growing number of companies, as well as the general difficulties that many teleworkers

experience while attempting to secure flexible arrangements, suggest that we would do

well not to assume telework is going to be an option in future jobs. This is particularly

troublesome for young women, who may be under the impression that if they ever decide

to have children, they can balance careers and family by instituting a telework option. We

should not take it for granted that telework will be a tool to alleviate the stress of work.

And even if it is widely available, there is a possibility, even a likelihood, it will create
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more problems for workers than it solves; increased isolation, reduced employer

responsibility for workplace safety, net-zero cost savings, loss of social interaction, and

professional stagnation, are real concerns.

Juliet Schor’s classic book The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline

of Leisure (1991), details how leisure under modern capitalism has diminished rather than

grown, even though productivity has largely increased. Her conclusions are helpful in

understanding the problem with telework, and how all the diverse chapters of this project

fit together. Schor includes a quote from an English nineteenth century factory inspector

named Leonard Horner, who said, “Moments are the elements of profit” (Schor, 1991, p.

49). In my research on telework, I still found this still to be true; the value of telework for

employees and employers alike is in the struggle over moments. Putting in a load of

laundry, taking a personal phone call, walking the dog, going for a jog, playing a few

minutes with the kids, or avoiding a commute, all became major victories for teleworkers,

even though they constituted short moments in the day. They gave workers a sense of

control. Even if they spent more of their day working, they felt as they had more

moments of leisure.

And they do spend more of their day working, which is part of the appeal of

telework for companies. Schor explained how in the old factory system, wages were paid

on a daily system rather than an hourly one, which meant that a fixed wage was given for

a day’s work, and people earned “neither more nor less as the working day expanded or

contracted.” This led employers to extend working hours by any means they could find,

and that meant identifying moments where the day could be lengthened (Schor, 1991, p.

54). Teleworkers describe working extra hours in the evening, on weekends, or whenever
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they have free time. They can weave work into their leisure routine easily with

telecommunications devices. They attend to domestic chores, childcare, and personal

appointments whenever they can step away from work, and then return to their job just as

seamlessly. The eight-hour workday in the office or factory has given way to a day filled

with working moments that often adds up to be far longer in the long run.

As I discovered in examining Marissa Mayer’s telework ban, but also in the

political economic analysis and worker interview chapters, the ability to collect and

capitalize on small worker moments of interaction in a located workplace is a valuable

commodity for employers and an important factor in human mental well-being. When

employees are working together, they talk and discuss issues, they brainstorm, and they

complain and commiserate in a series of moments. Mayer argued that these moments

were the key to innovation and success in the tech industry, an argument that was verified

in the political economic analysis. Although the workers interviewed for this project did

not share Mayer’s enthusiasm for innovation, they confirmed that workplace interaction

was a crucial component of any successful workplace because of important social

moments. Telework, or workplace flexibility, is a domain of class micro-struggle over

leisure time and work time, which is being waged in the minutia over small,

interconnected, alternating moments of work and non-work.

Marxist Feminisms and Telework

The implications of this research project can be felt in various different arenas,

one of those being the field of studies on domestic labor. The uneven distribution of

domestic labor is well documented in the literature on gender and work more broadly.

Arlie Russell Hochschild focuses her analysis on the lives of women who juggle the labor
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of reproduction and market wage labor. In the Second Shift (1990), Hochschild argues

that when both men and women in a domestic partnership are employed full-time, there

exists roughly a month’s worth of extra labor per year that must be done around the

home, and that the majority of this labor disproportionately falls onto the shoulders of

women. Whether it is cleaning the house, cooking meals, or caring for sick children in the

middle of the night, it is likely that the working mother will be responsible for ensuring

this work is completed.

In More than a Labour of Love (1980), Meg Luxton addresses the gendered

division of labor by focusing on the way fluctuations and changes in waged labor

organizes the way in which work is done in the home. For example, she argues that the

weekday/weekend rhythm of the wage labor system means that workers and children are

only available for social reproduction on weekends. This puts pressure on the

homeworker to condense domestic chores into the weekdays so that the weekends and

evenings are free for care work (Luxton 1980, p. 119). We have seen that telework holds

conflicting attractions for people with children, namely that remote work can allow them

more time with their children, even though they acknowledge that they cannot really

concentrate on work when their kids are around.

Again, the theorists of what is known as 'autonomist Marxism'--who emphasize

working class agency and struggle, and who study the wider scope of social labour-- can

help us better understand how telework and domestic labor are linked. As has been

argued by many of the autonomist scholars, capital does not pay for the labor of social

reproduction, which includes domestic labor; it gets if for free. Telework allows for the

weaving of reproductive tasks into the regular waged workday, which makes it easier for
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capital to benefit from the free labor people do. Capital requires healthy citizens, for

example, but a rigid work schedule can make it inconvenient for people to see a doctor,

or exercise regularly. Flexible work schedules mean that people are free to do these

things during the day, and so may be more likely to do these tasks (Hilbrect et al, 2008).

Telework then makes it much easier for people, especially women, to attend to the free

labor that capital requires.

Scholars from the autonomist Marxist tradition have made compelling arguments

for the reconceptualization of domestic labor as producing value under capitalism, and

thus integral to capital’s viability. Leopoldina Fortunati argues that the true secret of

social reproduction under capital, the "arcana" as she calls it, is that domestic labor is

productive labor but appears as a natural force. Fortunati argues, “Thus the real

difference between production and reproduction is not that of value/non-value, but that

while production both is and appears as the creation of value, reproduction is the creation

of value but appears otherwise” (Fortunati 1989, p. 8). Fortunati claims that the labor of

reproduction is in fact waged work; the female’s wage for domestic and emotional labor

is contained within the wage paid to her male partner by the capitalist for his labor. The

wage owner purchases labor power from his wife in order to reproduce his own labor

power. “Capital settles two credit debts when it pays the wage,” she says (Fortunati 1989,

p. 42). Selma James and Maria Rosa Dalla Costa argue that the homeworker produces a

commodity like any other, but one that is unequivocally the most important to capital: the

“living human being” (James and Dalla Costa 1972). The homeworker maintains the

dynamic relations between members of the working family in such a way that the ruling

classes can continue to extract profits from them. James and Dalla Costa posit that the
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nuclear family itself is a creation of capital, as it reflects the most productive organization

for the mass exploitation of labor. At the center of this dynamic is the subordination of

women to men. “Capital established the family as the nuclear family and subordinated

within it the woman to the man, as the person who, not directly participating in social

production, does not present herself independently on the labor market” (James and Dalla

Costa 1972).

According to Fortunati, labeling domestic and emotional labor as non-productive

because it is non-waged is a mere technicality that perpetuates the unrestrained extraction

of value from reproduction. Silvia Federici suggests that the structure of the global

economy perpetuates systemic inequalities in the world by concealing the struggles of

desperately poor women in developing countries from women working in the west.

Overworked middle-class mothers in the developed world rely on the labor of third world

poor women in order to make their own lives easier in the form of domestic labor, child

care, or food services (Federici, 1999, p. 63).

Marilyn Waring makes a similar argument about the productivity of gendered

labor, maintaining that the work of reproducing the human species is only without worth

within an economic model built to recognize only certain types of labor. She identifies a

critical point of contention in debates around the productivity of immaterial labor: work

produces value whether it is waged or not. It all depends on how one decides to measure

value. Growing food that is consumed by one’s own family is conventionally classified

non-productive labor, but if one sells that food, then it is productive labor. “Cooking,

according to economists, is ‘active labor’ when cooked food is sold and ‘economically

inactive labor’ when it is not. Housework is ‘productive’ when performed by a paid

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domestic servant and ‘nonproductive’ when no payment is involved” (Waring, 1990, p.

30-1).

I argue that telework is evidence of the productivity of domestic labor, and of the

general importance to capital of social reproductive labor like walking the dog or going to

the doctor. That these tasks can now be done during the regular workday without causing

a loss in productivity from one’s job, means that capital benefits twice from telework

arrangements. Not only do workers engage in activities that capital requires, but telework

ensures that workers do it on their own time, and not on capital’s. Work/life balance is

really just a more popular term that describes the human struggle to attend to all of the

labor, both domestic and waged, essential to modern capitalism. After all, when workers

attend to “life” in the work/life balance, they are attending to reproductive labor,

reproducing themselves as working subjects.

A contradiction emerges in my research though, relative to the canon of

Autonomist theory. Telework is primed to benefit capital in the way described above,

however, as I discovered, capital simultaneously loses the ability to extract surplus value

from the social interactions of collocated workers, which are also quite valuable. Only in

light of the recent telework bans are we able to hypothesize just how valuable worker

interaction is to the interests of corporations. Nonetheless, capital is forced to weigh the

value of flexible workers against the value of their social labor, and at least under the

post-Fordist labor regime, located workplaces are going to be around for some time.

Because domestic labor is unpaid and informal workplace collaboration is un-

codified and unmeasured, it is very difficult to identify their value--which explains the

fluctuations in popularity for telework. Working class struggle is the engine that moves
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capital, as the latter is simply a mechanism that attempts to capture the radical energy of

the working class and mold it into forms that are productive of surplus value, which is

then extracted by the ruling class (Tronti, 1966). The working class teleworker is resistant

to the rigidity of the traditional labor schedule and routine, but is also battling against

isolation, alienation, and chronic overwork that comes along with telecommuting. Capital

can either, allow for telework and take advantage of the domestic labor people do on their

own time, or prohibit telework and own the benefits of located social labor. The working

class is unsatisfied in either of these scenarios, which suggests two things: that the

problem of worker contentment under modern capitalism cannot be solved through

flexibility, and that the workplace is going to evolve beyond telework in order to capture

the radical energy percolating within the working class at this juncture.

Avenues for Future Research

This project opened up avenues for new research. For example, the Yahoo

telework ban was covered in the press as the ban unfolded, so it will be possible in the

future to conduct a follow-up study that expands the timeline and medium of inquiry.

Two years have passed since the ban at Yahoo. How has the coverage of the Yahoo

telework ban changed since then, and is it even being discussed any longer? Likewise,

conducting interviews with former Yahoo teleworkers, now either forced into the office

or forced to leave and work elsewhere, could yield exceptionally rich insight into the

culture of telework at Yahoo before the ban, as well as shed light on how Mayer’s

predictions about located working have played out.

Telework is very much in flux at the moment: it is hard to know what the future

holds. I believe my study has given us some sense of direction. The assumption that we
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have been on an inevitable march towards more flexible workplaces is misguided, as is

the assumption that it would benefit workers to have large-scale telework operations at

our workplaces. The reality is that telework depends far more on the needs of capital than

on the needs of families. Since workers’ needs are, under current arrangements,

secondary to the needs of capital, we have to remain vigilant about how and when we are

allowed to telework, as it is in all likelihood a sign that we are not benefitting in the ways

we believe we are.

In closing, I offer three recommendations for future telework policies and

practices, especially for managers of teleworkers, and advocates of telework. First,

flexibility for workers really means permeability, the interspersing of work throughout

our day, and so I contend that we should be cautious and skeptical about any arrangement

that seeks to further blur the boundaries between work and leisure time, especially if it

originates from, or is managed by, employers. The answer to the problems with work/life

balance under capitalism is not “flex time,” it is “less time.” Telework should be resisted

because it further erodes the line between work and leisure, and produces a situation

where we feel as though we are constantly at work. In Germany, labor ministry officials

are considering an outright ban on all after-hours work email, citing indisputable

evidence of a “connection between permanent availability and psychological diseases”

(Eckhardt, 2014). If what we seek is more leisure time, more family time, more personal

time, and thus better balance between work and leisure, then the answer is a wholesale

reduction in time spent at work.

That leads to the second recommendation, which is that if employers truly care

about maintaining work/life balance for their workers, then they must accept a reduction
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in the amount of work in hours for a full-time position, without also reducing the benefits

and workplace protections associated with full-time work. In other words, a full-time job

should be cut from approximately forty hours, which it is now in most of the industrial

world, to somewhere between ten and twenty hours a week, without making those

workers more precarious by cutting wages, pensions, health insurance, etc., which has

been the norm. The reason that we even need to discuss work/life balance as a topic, the

reason that it is a problem, is because work has encroached too far into our lives. Rather

than assuming that this problem is an inevitability, that we need to fit in leisure time

around work, we should consider taking the opposite approach and structure work around

our leisure time.

The third recommendation then is that we should strive to carry out work in

employer provided workplaces, which can be either central offices or coworking

facilities. Employers should also be encouraged to provide teleworking employees with a

subsidy to pay for space in a worker owned or privately owned coworking facility, where

remote worker's social and professional needs can be met. If our work time is overall

reduced, then the time spent in a workspace has the potential to be a deeply fulfilling

experience, both socially and economically, and would help protect a healthy boundary

between work and leisure time.

 146

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Appendices

Recruitment Advertisement

I am a graduate student researcher from the University of Western Ontario doing a

dissertation project on telework. I am looking for volunteers willing to be interviewed
about their experience working both in traditional office settings and in telework
arrangements. The interviews will take place via telephone or video conferencing
software (Facetime, Google Hangouts, Skype), and will take about an hour.

If you would like to tell your story, please contact with me your details at the email
address below. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me as well. Also, if you
have friends, family, or co-workers who may be willing to be interviewed, please pass
along my contact information.
 166

Western’s Research Ethics Board Approval

 167

Letter of Information and Consent Form

Project Title: The Failure of Flexibility: Telework and Capitalist Crisis

Principal Investigator:
Faculty of Information and Media Studies
University of Western Ontario
Letter of Information and Consent
You are being invited to participate in a research project because you are
currently a teleworker, or have teleworked in the past. This study is being conducted by a
graduate student from the University of Western Ontario, affiliated with the Faculty of
Information and Media Studies, as part of his Ph.D. dissertation work. The purpose of
this interview is to help us understand why some companies limit telework options for
their employees, despite a number of clear financial benefits. We hope that interviewees
can help us understand more about how certain work tasks are completed in telework
scenarios. The purpose of this letter is to provide you with information required for you
to make an informed decision regarding participation in this research.
I am looking for participants who have worked under both a telework scenario,
and a traditional office scenario, preferably doing the same general types of work under
both arrangements. I’m looking for equal numbers of male and female participants, and
equal numbers of people with and without children. I will only exclude people if I have a
one-sided sample (e.g. too many men, not enough parents).
If you agree to participate, you will be asked to schedule an interview with me at
your convenience. The interviews are expected to take approximately an hour and a half,
and can be broken up over two or more sessions if desired. They will take place via
telephone or video-conferencing software (such as Facetime, Google Hangout, or Skype,
whichever is preferred by the participant). Only the audio will be recorded. I will ask
open-ended questions that revolve around four broad categories. The first category is
general questions, meant to ascertain how long you teleworked, how many days a week
you work from home or somewhere else, where you have worked, and what type of work
you do. The second category will revolve around family/leisure commitments and the
 168

impact teleworking has had on them. The third category will focus on how your work
was managed while teleworking, how you motivated yourself to work, and if you felt you
were more or less productive while teleworking. The fourth and final set of questions is
related to how you collaborate and interact with coworkers and managers in both
teleworking and non-teleworking scenarios.
There is a slight possibility that participation in this project may put you at risk
for retribution or discrimination from your employer. You may not directly benefit from
participating in this study but information obtained could be used to improve the
work/life balance of working families. You will not be compensated for your
participation in this research. Participation in this project is voluntary. You may refuse to
participate, refuse to answer any questions, or withdraw from the study at any time. If at
any time you wish to withdraw your participation in this research project, simply let me
know and I will remove you from the list of contacts and destroy any data that you have
provided.
Every attempt will be made to provide anonymity with this research - your
personal information will be removed from your answers and pseudonyms will be used
for you or any other people’s names, cities of residence, and other identifiable
information if your answers are discussed in either a published paper or presentation of
the findings. All identifiable information will be kept in password-protected folders on a
personal computer, flash drive, and university network drive, all of which are encrypted
and password-protected, and only accessible by the student researcher. The only
identifiable marker that will not be anonymous is your current and former places of
employment. All recorded interviews will be destroyed after they have been transcribed
and analyzed. Western University protocol dictates that research records are to be kept
for 5 years, after which they will be destroyed. Ensuring the accuracy of your statements
is vital, so recording the interviews is strongly encouraged. However, if you wish to
participate without having your voice recorded, please let me know and we can work to
find an acceptable accommodation.
You indicate your voluntary agreement to participate in this study at the time you
schedule an interview, at which point I will ask you to verbally confirm that you have
read this statement and voluntarily agree to participate. Responding to interview
 169

questions is consent to participate, and it is also consent to have your interview recorded.
Representatives of Western University’s Non-Medical Research Ethics Board may
contact you or require access to your study-related records to monitor the conduct of the
research. I sincerely thank you again for your participation; please feel free to contact me
at any time if you have any questions or concerns.

If you have any questions about your rights as a research participant or the conduct of this
study, you may contact The Office of Research Ethics (519) 661-3036, email:
ethics@uwo.ca.

This letter is yours to keep for future reference.

 170

Interview Questions

Section 1: General Questions

1. Where do you work?

2. What type of work do you do?

3. How long did you telework?

4. How many days per week did you telework?

5. Do you work closely with a team?

6. What other companies have you worked for in this industry?

Section 2: Family Questions

1. Do you feel that teleworking has allowed you more leisure time than you had
under traditional work organizations?

2. What is the most significant drawback to teleworking? What is the largest

advantage to teleworking?

3. Some authors say that the telework can increase the number of work/family
transition periods, which are moments in the day where one is exiting leisure or
personal time for work, or vice versa. Have you experienced a problem with
increased work/family transitions?

4. Do you set strict time boundaries between work time and leisure?
 171

5. Do you have children? If so, what do they think of you teleworking?

6. How often do you take breaks from work? How do you take a break?

Section 3: Self-management Questions

1. Did you find it easy to avoid doing work while teleworking?

2. Did you feel you worked more or less while teleworking?

3. How did you motivate yourself to do work while teleworking?

4. How was your work evaluated while teleworking?

5. Have there been any recent changes in your company’s telework policies or
practices?

6. Has there been any additional monitoring of your work while in the office?

Section 4: Collaboration Questions

1. Did you feel more or less isolated while teleworking?

2. Did you work on team projects while teleworking? If so, how did you
collaborate?

3. What technology/software do you use for teleworking? (Skype, Facetime,

Hangouts, other?)

4. Did you find it easy to collaborate while teleworking?

 172

5. Did you generally perform work tasks and personal tasks at the same time while
teleworking? More or less than while working in an office?

6. Were you required to work a certain number of hours while teleworking, or was it
project based?
 173

Curriculum Vitae

Eric Lohman

Education

Ph.D., Media Studies, University of Western Ontario, 2015.

M.A., Media Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2010, 3.9 Cumulative GPA.

B.A., Journalism and Mass Communication, Sub-major: Media Studies, Minor: History:
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2008, 3.7 Cumulative GPA.

Research Assistantships

Research assistant to Dr. Paul Brewer and Dr. Barbara Ley on untitled research project,
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, spring 2010:
 Duties included searching archives for relevant historical material, contacting
archivists for assistance, examining and presenting found material for review by
advisor.

“Survey of Job Openings in the Milwaukee Metropolitan Area: Week of May 25, 2009.”
Research assistant to Dr. Lois Quinn, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee: Employment
and Training Institute, summer 2009:
 Duties included collecting data through telephone surveys and internet searches,
followed by the organization and coding of the found data.
 174

“Purging Dissent: Women Writers and the Broadcast Blacklist.” Research assistant to Dr.
Carol Stabile, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, spring 2008:
 Duties included searching archives for relevant historical material, contacting
archivists for assistance, examining and presenting found material for review by
advisor.

Publications

"[S]He is Working When [S]He is Not at Home": Challenging Assumptions about

Remote Work. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Western Ontario.

“Running Mother Ragged: Women and Labour in the Age of Telecommuting.” In

Feminist Erasures: Challenging Backlash Culture, edited by Kaitlynn Mendes and Kumi
Silva. New York: Palgrave Macmillan (January 2015).

“Where is the Love?’: Gender in De Beers Diamond Advertising,” M.A. Thesis.

Conference Presentations

"The Flexibility Fetish: A Political Economy of Telework," paper presented at the Union
for Democratic Communications Circuits of Struggle Conference: University of Toronto,
May, 2015.

“Madison Avenue Misogyny: The Decontextualization of Patriarchy in Mad Men,” paper

presented at the Film and History Conference: University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh,
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, September 2012.

“Who Are We Laughing At?’ The Postfeminist Male Audience for De Beers Diamond
Advertising,” paper presented at the Canadian Communication Association Annual
Conference: University of New Brunswick & St. Thomas University, Fredericton, NB,
June 2011.

“Scary Tale Weddings: Competing for Cosmetic Surgery in Bridal Reality Television,”
paper presented at the inaugural conference for the Popular Culture Association of
Canada: Brock University, Niagara Falls, ON, May 2011.
 175

“’Why Wait?’: De Beers Diamond Advertising to Women, 1995-2010,” paper presented

at the

Society of Graduate Students Research Forum: University of Western Ontario, London

ON, February 2011.

“Say Yes to the Mess: Competing Femininities in Wedding Reality Television,” paper
presented at the Console-ing Passions International Conference on Television, Audio,
Video, New Media and Feminism: University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, April 2010.

Teaching

Lecturer, Political Economy of the Mass Media, Faculty of Information and Media
Studies, University of Western Ontario, Fall 2013, Fall 2014.

Lecturer, Gender, Race, and Class in Wedding Media, Faculty of Information and Media
Studies, University of Western Ontario, Fall 2012, Winter 2014.

Head Teaching Assistant, Political Economy of the Mass Media; responsible for
administrative work on behalf of 10 teaching assistants, including some marking and
assisting Professor Jonathan Burston with lecture preparation. Faculty of Information and
Media Studies, University of Western Ontario, Winter 2012, Winter 2013.

Teaching Assistant, Mapping Media and Cultural Theory; responsible for instruction of
approximately 30 students in single discussion sections. Faculty of Information and
Media Studies, University of Western Ontario, Fall 2011.

Teaching Assistant, Information and the Public Sphere; responsible for assisting students
with group projects, and marking exams. Faculty of Information and Media Studies,
University of Western Ontario, Winter 2011, Winter 2015.
 176

Teaching Assistant, Political Economy of the Mass Media; responsible for instruction of
approximately 30 students in single discussion sections. Faculty of Information and
Media Studies, University of Western Ontario, Fall 2010.

Teaching Assistant, Introduction to Mass Media, responsible for instruction of

approximately 60 students in three discussion sections. Department of Journalism and
Mass Communication, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2008-2010.

Invited Presentations and Guest Lectures

“The Future of the Internet: Walled Garden or Digital Commons?.” Presented to MIT
2100 The Political Economy of the Mass Media (Professor Jonathan Burston). Faculty of
Information and Media Studies: The University of Western Ontario, March 2013.

“Where is the Love?: Feminism and De Beers Diamond Advertising.” Presented at

Forum: Faculty of Information and Media Studies Professor Lecture Series, sponsored
by the Faculty of Information and Media Studies Student Council: Univeristy of Western
Ontario, March 2013.

“Running Mother Ragged: Women and Labour in the Age of Telework.” Presented at
Mediations Student Speaker Series, sponsored by the Faculty of Information and Media
Studies Subcommittee for Intellectual Life: University of Western Ontario, September
2012.

“Life in a Fairy Tale: Gender and Class in Wedding Media.” Presented to MIT 3210
Women in the Media (Professor Romayne Smith-Fullerton). Faculty of Information and
Media Studies: The University of Western Ontario, November 2011.

“The Bad News: The Downside to Citizen Journalism.” Presented to MIT 2100 The
Political Economy of the Mass Media (Professor Jonathan Burston). Faculty of
Information and Media Studies: The University of Western Ontario, March 2012.
 177

Awards and Recognition

Louise J. Kordus Memorial Scholarship Award, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee:

Spring 2009

Magna cum Laude, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, May 2008

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Dean’s Honor List six semesters

Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee:

Spring 2008

Academic Services

Communications Chair for the Public Service Alliance of Canada Local 610 Teaching

Assistant Union at the University of Western Ontario: May 2013- April 2014.

Vice President of External Affairs and Communication, Soceity of Graduate Students at

the University of Western Ontario: May 2012-April 2013.

Society of Graduate Students councilor: elected position representing the Faculty of

Information and Media Studies doctoral students, Summer 2011-Spring 2012.

Graduate Teaching Assistant’s Union Steward: elected position representing the Faculty
of Information and Media Studies doctoral students, Fall 2011-Spring 2012.

Board Memberships

Member of the Advocates for Informed Choice Board of Directors, August 2015-present.

Member of the Candian Federation of Students Ontario Executive Board, May 2012-
April 2013