ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the nature of the demand for telework through in-depth interviews with company and personnel managers from ten public and private organisations which have used teleworkers in the case study areas. It considers three key aspects of the use of teleworkers by the organisations; the motivations behind using teleworkers; the methods of recruiting teleworkers and the organisations' experiences of using teleworkers. The chapter inspects the decision of organisations to outsource work, and also focuses on the use of teleworkers specifically over other forms of sub-contractors such as larger enterprises. For instance within the large private multinationals in particular, methods used to recruit teleworkers reflected a relatively closed system. The chapter investigates the wider structural influences on the development of telework and the general experiences of telework from the organisational perspective. It emerges that demand for self-employed telework has tended to be for specialist expertise beyond the capabilities of m-house staff, rather than an over-flow from organisations' in-house functions.
