ABSTRACT
A number of scholars have focused on the ways in which the proliferation of virtual work impacts existing organisational structures. Given that so much of organisational life is assumed to be created and maintained within the physical boundary of a workplace, virtual workers can pose a considerable challenge to the cultures of organisations Jackson and van der Wielen 1998). In this chapter I focus on one group of virtual workers – home-based professional or managerial employees (salaried teleworkers). I argue that these employees can provide significant insight on the ways in which organisations can use the growth of virtual work to develop employee-centred workplaces and challenge structures of discrimination often embedded in traditional organisational hierarchies. The lived experiences of teleworkers not only provide useful individual-level feedback on the effectiveness of work-at-home programmes and policies currently in place but also highlight the ways in which it is organisations, and their own treatment of telework, which determine the long-term effects of the proliferation of virtual work. With reference to qualitative interviews with fifty women and men (in Canada) who work at home, this chapter serves to highlight the contributions they make to ways in which organisations can be re-formed (for both virtual and non-virtual workers) through the introduction of telework. The discussion in this chapter is focused around two areas on which organisational concern about telework is often situated: economic and non-economic cost-benefit analyses and analyses on the organisational readiness for telework. The experiences of teleworkers reveal that while they are ‘virtual’ workers in that they are distanced from their organisations, they continue to be embedded in a physical environment (in their case, the home). Given the historical definition of the home as a private, extra-organisational space, teleworkers are seen to be working ‘outside’ organisational boundaries; they highlight the lack of trust, the need for visibility and the assumption of physical presence underlying knowledge-exchange within their organisations. This analysis reveals that the move towards virtual work would require a fundamental rethinking of the notion of organisation itself and necessitate its reconceptulisation as a set of relationships rather than as a physical site.
