Dismantling the home office

Posted on | March 30, 2010 | 4 Comments

This weekend I took apart our home office. It’s the first step in reclaiming my life after finishing the book manuscript. In a tiny 2 bedroom apartment, there’s not much room in the first place. Why would I work in one of them? When clearly my study shows I can work in all of them? :-)

More seriously, what I’m talking about is developing a personal response to the things I found in writing the book, particularly chapter seven, which talks about home offices and their impact on relationships and families.

On the one hand, there’s something interesting going on in working couples where one partner is “entitled” to use the home office for paid work – and therefore entitled to solitude or intimacy with work – while the other “enjoys” the alleged benefits of domesticity: open rooms, noise, food, tv, phone calls, hanging out with kids (insert favourite pursuit here).

There’s also the family that spends a lot of time in separate rooms on separate screens – messaging each other if they interact at all. Parents worry that they aren’t being domestic in the right way by spending nights alone and apart from others in the house. But how does this compare over time, across history? Does the concern come because these parents grew up with television, which somehow facilitated domestic unity better? Or is it something else entirely? What is the function of domesticity anyway?

In the book I suggest that online sites like Facebook actually take on some of the characteristics of domesticity if this means having reliable companions and witnesses at routine hours of the day. So what does this mean for co-habitation for work-focused online types? What becomes of the actually physically present people professionals live with when they spend so much time online?

Another issue I want to think about when it comes to home offices is how they so often look like work offices: with all of the corporate mundanity such an aesthetic implies. A sample of photos from the study helps to illustrate this.

Some immediate questions that strike me are: who can afford to have a separate room of the house for work in addition to an office at work? Is a home office or study a necessity? What are the reasons people think it is a necessity? Are they right?

By extension, what would happen if we thought about labour politics in terms of space – that is, if we decided not to invest in real estate to make up for workplace inadequacies? Here I am specifically avoiding the situation of students and freelancers, which I take up in other chapters of the book. But some of the photos above are of part-time workers’ home offices which they used during days away from “the office”.

In future I think I might need to explore a materialist account – OMG even an actor-network-theory account (?!) – of how objects bring a set of affects and associations that can infect the home space with work anxieties. I’m reminded of the television producer who had to shut the door on her home office sometimes so she couldn’t see the objects that had such power to symbolise WORK; or the part-time worker who had to hide the laptop at home on Fridays so that she wouldn’t log in to her email.

For the moment, a big question coming out of the study is: to what extent do we willingly set up these domestic cubicles and enslave ourselves to a continuum of corporate culture stretching from work to home? Is having a home office a luxury, a convenience, and also a significant means by which we accept certain logics and vistas (the pun on the Microsoft name is intended) and therefore become habituated to an all-encompassing grid of productivity?

Category: Research, Work

Comments

4 Responses to “Dismantling the home office”

  1. ana australiana
    March 31st, 2010 @ 12:36 pm

    To make an aesthetic break from this grid we could always try the 15 year old boy’s bedroom model proposed here!

    http://www.cinestatic.com/infinitethought/2010/03/academic-officesmovingetc.asp

  2. MC
    March 31st, 2010 @ 4:53 pm

    I have a housewarming gift from one G Fuller that I think would serve this purpose quite well. It involves a lady, body paint and the Sydney Swans club vest.

  3. Lawson
    April 3rd, 2010 @ 9:31 pm

    Very interesting thoughts, Melissa, and I must say I’ve only come to your work through this blog really, so forgive my ignorance, though I do look forward to getting the book when it’s out.

    Anyhow, I wanted to ask if you have (or have proposed) an alternative model? Just in terms of when we know that domesticity and so-called ‘leisure’ are themselves forms of labour or commodified in some way – do you propose a return to ‘leisure’ in the household or something else? Would love your thoughts, and thanks for all the interesting food for thought!

  4. melgregg
    April 8th, 2010 @ 9:02 am

    Hi Lawson, thanks for asking. I definitely mention the points you’re raising: that the home has always been a place for labour (perhaps for some people more than others though). New technologies offer us a way to recognise this better than we have in the past. I’m organising a workshop later in the year to talk about how gender theory might better inform our notions of labour and economics – hopefully this will provide more grounds for discussion.

    There is a lot of really interesting literature now looking at productive leisure – particularly for the middle class types that I focus on in my study. But an ongoing sideproject of mine is to look at the history of home-based practices of citizenship, particularly among women: here I’m thinking about home economics programs and organisations like the CWA that are the legacy of empire. I would love to have more time to write about all this!

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