ABSTRACT
A source of this persistence is a symbolic scheme where co-presence sustains owners’ moral and actual authority and distance undermines it. This ‘presence’ discourse has yet to yield to ‘performance’ discourse, another moral and technical system that would evaluate outputs instead of counting inputs. It would recognise the value to individuals and organisations of the self-management implicit in temporal and spatial flexibility. Together, the semiotics of time and space and the panopticon principle override communicative, competence and household logics: the communicative logics of substituting presence with asynchronicity and virtual presence, the competence logics of time for thinking without interruption in a high ‘noise’ office and the household logics of self-scheduling to meet the routine and non-routine exigencies of domestic households (Perin 1991).
