Recasting the Home-Work Relationship: A Case of Mutual Adjustment?

Advances in communication and information technologies, changing managerial strategies and changing cultural expectations about the location of (paid) work, have meant that paid work is increasingly conducted from home. Home then becomes the place where the discourse of industrial production meets with the discourse of household production. We analyse the relationship between these two traditionally separate discourses, which, through the disintegration of the time/space compression, increasingly come to bear on each other. We report on the experiences of home-workers and their families coping with the co-presence of the sometimes conflicting and sometimes competing demands and values embedded in such discourses. In doing so, we contribute to current understandings of the complexities inherent in emergent forms of organization, as the relationship between work and home is recast. Theoretically and methodologically, this empirical study is located within a discursive framework, and we emphasize the usefulness of such approaches to studying organizational realities.