ABSTRACT
The era of teleworking started during the 1980s. Early projects and experiments with teleworking were run, for example, in the printing industry, with female workers performing low-skilled text processing and datatyping (for Germany, see, for example, Goldmann and Richter 1991; Huws et al. 1990). Over the years teleworking facilities rapidly became cheaper and, therefore, teleworking started to become attractive in a variety of different areas of work with low-skilled as well as high-skilled jobs (see Handy and Mokhtarian 1996; Nilles 1994). However, the cost of hardware and software is just one aspect; other aspects about the attractiveness of installing teleworking programmes are concerned with diverse financial and non-financial reasons. For example, we find ‘hard’ arguments like real-estate, energy and labour costs, as well as ‘soft’ arguments like binding of high-qualified employees to the organisation, higher concentration on work or control over working time etc.
