Mid-semester break

Posted on | September 25, 2009 | 3 Comments

I have a little break from teaching now and will be a) catching up on a few ongoing projects b) having a birthday holiday!

Some of you would have heard the interview I did on Radio National yesterday about Facebook in the workplace, which drew on the material mentioned here a few weeks ago. Thanks to Mark and Legal Eagle for the background that helped get some of that message across.

Next week I’m presenting some research from the Working From Home study at the AMSRS conference in Sydney. This will be a sketch of the pros and cons of working from home for those in industry. It will particularly focus on how this trend affects women more than men – and from my understanding this is why it will be topical for a fairly feminised industry like market research.

The general argument is that women like working from home because office cultures haven’t changed enough to be welcoming, in spite of the new rhetoric of “flexibility” and “diversity” in the workplace. In addition, if companies are seeing “home-shoring” as comparable to “off-shoring” in the drive to cut infrastructure expenses, they should be aware of the amount of hidden labour that goes on once work leaves the office. Surveillance technologies may be able to tell when workers log on and log off, but are they likely to care if women work longer hours than they should?

This talk is based on a chapter from my book, Work’s Intimacy, which I’m very happy to say has been contracted to Polity Press. Obviously there is a longer story to tell about this decision, given the public statements I’ve made about the need for domestic publishing industry support for young scholars. But for now I’m focusing on getting the rest of the manuscript done, motivated by some very encouraging readers’ reports.

Thursday I’m also heading to Melbourne for a fun event at ACMI, where I will be interviewing Andrew Rule about Underbelly. I have some door passes if you’re in Melbourne and would like to come. I am very excited about this! And have really enjoyed preparing for it.

Things feel good work-wise at the moment. I think the move to Sydney is definitely giving the research I’ve been doing a bit more traction than it might have. But in a much more significant way I’m really enjoying having some company during the long hours at the office. The department at Sydney seems uniquely blessed at the moment with with lots of young scholars who are all working on amazing things. Fiona Allon recently won a Future Fellowship to work in the department on her project “The Wealth Effect: A cultural analysis of prosperity, financialisation and everyday life in contemporary Australia”. So great to see a cultural studies project on such an important topic getting support from the ARC. Tonight we are celebrating Anna Hickey-Moody’s book launch for Unimaginable Bodies, just a couple of weeks after Kane Race’s launch of Pleasure Consuming Medicine.

It’s a joy to be sharing the corridor with colleagues doing such important work – and who also know how to party!

Category: Academia, Events, Reading, Travel

Comments

3 Responses to “Mid-semester break”

  1. Rachel Hills
    September 25th, 2009 @ 3:09 pm

    Very interesting stuff about the feminisation of working from home – I hadn’t thought of that before. Are there similar patterns for WFH freelancers/self-employed people?

    And what’s the timeline for your book’s release?

  2. melgregg
    September 26th, 2009 @ 4:42 pm

    Hi Rachel, I’ve been looking at workers in large organisations – no freelancers or self-employed in the study. But plenty of stories in the finance press suggest women are starting their own businesses in response to poor treatment and/or lack of recognition in office settings. In the book I bring together analysis of this kind with similar reflections in interviews. It will be out in August next year I think.

  3. skepticlawyer
    September 26th, 2009 @ 7:00 pm

    Just having a listen to your interview now, interesting stuff.

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