ABSTRACT
This chapter examines e-technology, workplace behaviors and the policies that guide them, as well as workplace privacy and employer monitoring. It looks at how companies use telecommuting and virtual workgroups to increase productivity. Professor Carolyn Boulger, in e-Technology and the Fourth Economy, shows how the movement from hunting and gathering to an economy based on agriculture and then industrial production made civilization possible. When MIT media technology professor Nicholas Negroponte told that “being digital” is not simply a way of communicating but a new way of living, only the propeller-heads, IT gurus and technology buffs were enthusiastic. Along with all of the advantages that the new technology brings to our homes, our businesses, and our personal and professional lives, it also brings complications. Despite the fact that e-mail is part of a new technology that has changed the ways in which we communicate, many of the old rules apply.
