Working from home

So the book writing is getting to the inane stage - time to start on the ARC application. I need some serious help with this, as I’ve said before. I’m still looking for some help with the brainstorming and with situating what I want to do within currently existing work in the area. The working title for the project is (thanks Gully): ‘Working from home: New media technology, workplace culture and the changing nature of domesticity’. It’s going to have three stages - a survey of new media ads featuring technology and workplaces; a major research component looking at the technology use of workers in three industries - information, communication and education; then a series of workshops/seminars with the broader university community and other industry/government advocates.

At the moment I’m trying to work out why I don’t want to write about workers in the creative industries, even though the project looks at new media technology. So much is being written about creative workers, probably because it’s easy to justify in terms of newness, but also because there is a degree of glamour attached to creative workers and content providers (even if it’s imaginary). Basically, it’s the exciting end of spectrum. It’s about the ‘future’ of work: it serves to allegorise wider shifts in the economy in affluent societies.

I’m interested in those who are at the less extraordinary end, in fact, those whose workplaces are still heavily hierarchised and bureacratised and who are dealing with the roll-out of new technology often with very little agency. I want to look at big organisations, not the entrepreneurs and the flexible artisan types. I want to look at what technologies the bosses get to use as opposed to the casuals - and what technologies are assumed to be available ‘outside’ the workplace that are nonetheless used for work purposes (hence ‘working from home’). Taking account of larger firms/corporations with more diversity in the range of employees seems to me a more representative indication of how changes brought by technology are playing out. So as much as I am interested in what is ‘new’ about all this - particularly the way that ‘flexibility’ in work location is changing traditionally gendered understandings of work, home and technology use - I’m actually trying to understand how much is staying the same. In fact my aim is to find out whether technology use draws into great clarity the ways in which earlier forms of exploitation, inequality and discrimination (both in and outside work) may be increasing. My hunch is that this is because the claims of identity politics (gender, race, sexuality, disability, etc) have been successfully interpreted in neoliberal discourse as simply claims for work: eliding any wider and necessary recognition of claims which might reimagine and hence threaten the overall structure of society.