Working from home - recruitment begins

This past week Nadia and I have been busy recruiting participants for the interview stage of my APD project, “Working from home: New media technology, workplace culture and the changing nature of domesticity.” The study will follow the technology use of 30 workers across Brisbane for the next three years, focusing on those in the information, communication and education sectors of the so-called New Economy.

Straight from the info sheet:

This research project seeks to provide a voice for ordinary workers to describe the impact of new media technology on their work and home life. It asks whether the independent, flexible and ‘mobile’ work practices made possible by new technologies influence traditional distinctions between work and home life as well as more general attitudes about the appropriate locations for paid labour. Participants will be interviewed once a year for three years in both their workplace and their home. Interviews will last approximately ½ an hour and will take place at different times of the year in each instance. The interviews are designed to allow employees to reflect on how their work and home life has changed over a distinct period of time and to comment on the role of technology in these changes. The evidence gathered by the project will provide an important basis for advising both employers and government on current trends in the workplace so that suitable policies can be formulated for the provision and the limits of technology use for work purposes.

The idea behind the study was to come up with some data to quantify the trickle-effect of the State Government’s significant financial, infrastructural and rhetorical investment in the idea of Queensland as the Smart State; that is, its performative and arguably quite successful management of the necessary shift to an information economy. We hear on a daily basis how many people are moving to the South East corner of Queensland to take advantage of the employment and lifestyle opportunities in this region. Yet we have very little research on what people’s work experiences are like at an organisational or individual level in the very industries that are touted as attractive.

On a broader level, much journalistic attention has been directed to the forms of independent labour developing in the creative sector of this economy, giving rise to notions of the “creative class” of entrepreneurs (and State Government-sponsored lecture tours for their authors). Far less attention has been given to the ways in which new forms of imposition, exploitation and self-surveillance may also accompany these significant changes in work life. The possibility that new technologies may add further layers to already existing inequalities in hierarchical workplaces is rarely entertained, much less accounted for, in available literature. My project sets out to fill this substantial gap in the “new economy” story.

So often it seems that the project-based, entrepreneurial dimension to creative labour is taken as the beginning of a wider shift towards the freelance workplace as norm. Certainly a lot of valuable research is showing the difficulties entailed in such a shift (the work of Ros Gill is one example), but so far we lack resources to describe the experiences of ordinary office workers in the present. A substantial amount of the content produced in the information economy still emanates from big organizations— corporations, government agencies, universities. This is particularly the case in cities like Brisbane: its smaller population may make it an ideal “second office” city for established organizations but it can’t offer the same prospects for freelance work as cities with higher urban density and stronger traditions of artistic practice.

The study attempts to document whether working conditions may actually remain the same within many workplaces, that is, whether the combination of bureaucratic and corporate modes of governance may prevent many workers from exercising much agency in their daily lives at all. Taking larger firms with a diverse range of employees into account will hopefully give some indication of the way changes to labour practice are (or are not) playing out.

We’ve been lucky so far in that UQ employees are signing on already, and the State Librarian has also agreed to let us interview workers at the newly refurbished State Library of Queensland (itself a development of the Smart State policy). Obviously we’re also keen to get other cultural and communication bodies involved, and not just state-funded ones. So while we’re in contact with employees at the ABC at the moment, we’re also wanting to talk to people from News Ltd. and other commercial partners.

If any of these workplace experiences sound like you, or you’d like your employees to participate in the study, please get in touch directly, as it takes a bit of scheduling to set these interviews up. I’d also welcome more general feedback below, but if you’d prefer not to comment publicly, my contact details are available here.