ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on professional home-based telework. Qualitative interviews were conducted with women and men working at home in Canada. I begin with a brief overview of telework within the Canadian context, and of the methodology followed for this study. The chapter then focuses on the ways in which teleworkers organise their paid work activities within the home. By working at home these workers disrupt the boundary between ‘work’ and ‘nonwork’ which is conventionally constructed as a physical distinction between workplace and home. Teleworkers stress the inaccuracy of the assumption that the workplace is the domain of ‘work’, while the home is the domain of ‘nonwork’. They develop extremely efficient ways of working within the home, and refer to what they do as ‘real work’. Teleworkers plan their work to a great degree and measure their work through outcomes. In this way, they define ‘real work’ in terms of planning and measurement, rather than in terms of location. They argue that many of the activities that are currently paid for in the office setting (such as informal interactions) are in fact ‘non-work’. In addition, the office environment (part of the ‘public sphere’ which is associated with ‘work’) is constructed as a less appropriate environment for effective ‘real work’ compared to the private sphere of the home.
