Protecting the boundary: Teleworker insights on the expansive concept of "work"

Gender & Society; Thousand Oaks; Apr 1998; Kiran Mirchandani;

Volume: 12
Issue: 2
Start Page: 168-187
ISSN: 08912432
Subject Work at home
Terms: Women
Employment
Definitions
Abstract:
Drawing on interviews with women who work at home, Mirchandani examines how and why women narrowed the meaning of work and
explores some of the costs that may accompany a more expansive definition of work.
Full Text:
Copyright Sage Publications, Inc. Apr
1998
[Headnote]
Feminist scholars have consistently argued for broadened definitions of work that include the invisible family and emotion work done
predominantly by women. This article focuses on women's resistance.r to placing these various activities into the common category of
work Drawing from interviews with teleworkers (women who work at home), it examines how and why women narrowed the meaning of
work and explores some of the costs that may accompany a more expansive definition of work.
Feminist theorists have illuminated the numerous ways in which conventional definitions of work are fundamentally gendered. As
Kobayashi, Peake, Benenson, and Pickles note, the myth of the "masculine work norm" assumes that production is a male domain that
occurs in the public sphere and that men's labor can be used as a general standard to understand all work activities (1994, xv; see also
Acker 1992; Ferree 1990; Tancred 1995). This masculine work norm ensures that many of the activities that women (and some men)
engage in on a day-to-day basis are unseen, devalued, and labeled as less important than the "real work" done by men.
This article focuses on one feminist challenge to the assumption of the masculine work norm. Theorists suggest that the concept of work
should be redefined to include many of the activities that women assume responsibility for and that are currently unrecognized and
therefore devalued (Daniels 1987; DeVault 1991; Fisher and Tronto 1990; Rutman 1996; Smith 1987). This broadening of the definition
of work, it is suggested, would ]lead to the recognition of the effort involved in creating and sustaining family life, both physically and
emotionally. It would also involve a revaluation of much of the interaction and emotion work that women engage in as part of their paid
work jobs.
In keeping with the strong tradition of developing theoretical insight by taking the daily lives of women as starting points of inquiry
(Harding 1992; Smith 1987), this article draws on interviews with 30 teleworkers (women who do their paid work in the home) to evaluate
the consequences of broadening the concept of work. Telework (or telecommuting, as it is referred to in the United States) is a work
arrangement whereby an individual does paid work within her or his home rather than at a central office. Unlike women doing piecework
at home (such as garment sewing or data entry), teleworkers are highly educated and well-paid salaried employees who work for a wide
range of public and private sector organizations. Recent Canadian data show that there are 600,000 salaried workers who do their paid
work at home (Siroonian 1993, 50; see Cray, Hodson, and Gordon 1994 for data on the United States), although these figures are likely to
be conservative estimates given the difficulties associated with counting home-based work (Huws 1988; Mirchandani 1996; Pratt 1987).
Telework is often targeted at highly valued employees and is situated within company "work-family" initiatives that serve to ease the
conflict employees experience between their work and family lives.
The teleworkers interviewed for the present study are among this group of highly paid and organizationally valued employees. These
women work in a variety of occupations and do their paid work at home during regular business hours. Given that they do their paid work
and their other activities in the home, they draw the boundary around the concept of work on a daily basis. Their insight on, and resistance
to, various definitions of work provide a guide for future theoretical reflection on the concept.
EXPANDING WORK
Building on the insights about gendered conceptions of work, feminist theorists attempt to develop notions of work that do not exclude the
activities and contributions of women. Accordingly, several theorists call for an expansion of the concept of work into a "more ample and
generous fon" (Smith 1987, 165). As Daniels writes, work should also include domestic and child care activities that are currently carried
out in the private sphere, volunteer work in the public sphere, as well as emotion and "invisible" work in both the public and private
spheres. It should be recognized that "all these activities involve real work" (Daniels 1987,412; see also DeVault 1991; Friedson 1990;
Kahn-Hut, Daniels, and Colvard 1982; Wadel 1979; Wallman 1979). Similarly, Armstrong and Armstrong argue that feminist theories of
work "must consider all labor involved in acquiring what is deemed necessary for survival by different social classes in different racial and
cultural groups and in different historical periods" (1990,13). There are two areas of scholarship through which feminist theorists have
attempted to broaden the definition of work.
Family Work
During the past 20 years, feminist scholars have attempted to excavate the nature, complexity, and skill involved in the work done in the
sphere conventionally associated with leisure-the home. Attempts to gain recognition of these activities as work have included the focus
on the ways in which domestic work is an integral part of capitalist economy (Adkins 1995; Bris]cin 1980; Finch 1983; Glazer 1993), the
hazardous nature of this work (Rosenberg 1990), and the skill and energy it involves (Luxton 1990). DeVault, for example, focuses on the
need to recognize "doing a meal" as work. Feeding work is, in fact, the "staging of the . . . complex social events that we label meals"
(1991, 35). In looking at feeding as work, DeVault is able to show how it involves not only cooking but also continuous attention to family
members' individual preferences, linking household needs to societal institutions through provisioning and caring about the nutrition of the
foods that family members consume. These activities take "thoughtful foresight, simultaneous attention to several different aspects of the
project, and a continuous openness to ongoing events and interaction" (DeVault 1991, SS). DeVault notes that many of these activities do
not fit with narrow definitions of work that are based on the clear-cut dichotomization of social life into work or leisure, since much of
family work seems to combine work and leisure. With a "broader understanding of work itself' (DeVault 1991, 237), the invisible
dimensions of feeding and caring work can be acknowledged and its critical importance for group life recognized.
In a similar way, Abel and Nelson (1990) identify caregiving as encompassing both caring about (affective relations) and caring for
(instrumental tasks). Fisher and Tronto highlight the fact that all activities involve a caring dimension; caring is defined as "a species
activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair our 'world' (1990, 39-40); they note that time, material
resources, knowledge, and skill are preconditions for caring activity. By broadening the scope of caring to include a "whole range of
human activities that serve to sustain us" (1990, 40), Fisher and Tronto attempt to document the widespread prevalence of caring work,
which is done predominantly by women and is seldom recognized as multidimensional, difficult, and sometimes contradictory (1990,
3740). Hochschild (1983) similarly notes that just as jobs involve "feeling management," families too have emotional cultures that have to
be continually recreated. Hochschild focuses on the labor involved in "relating to a brooding adolescent, an obstreperous toddler, rivaling
siblings cr a retreating spouse" (1996, 28). Fishman (1982) draws attention to women's work in establishing and maintaining
conversations; approaching interaction as work, she reveals the gendered division of labor in this work and argues that through the
assumption that women naturally interact, the "idea that it is work is obscured" (1982,180). Finally, feminist scholars have documented
women's work in linking the public and private spheres. For example, Glazer notes that the work involved in "linking or knitting together
for-profit enterprises and state programs with daily life" is often obscured and hidden from view (1993, 10); Daniels likewise argues that
tailoring is "part of the invisible work in social life" (1987, 405).
Emotion Work on the Job
Another approach to broadening the definition of work begins with the insight that many of the activities that are integral to individuals'
jobs are, in fact, not recognized as work. Adkins's study of the British tourist industry (1995) reveals the ways in which work in hotel
management requires managers to have wives, who do not have any employment contract but care for their husbands and families as well
as perform many of the routine and hidden administrative tasks, boost sales in pubs by doing "sexual work" (since men like to be served
by women), and cut the wage bill by being on call 24 hours a day. Women are encouraged to think of the hotel as their homes.
Forms of emotion work are also illuminated by Hochschild in her study of flight attendants. Hochschild notes that management and
passengers expect flight attendants to continuously "induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces
the proper state of mind in others" (1983, 7). Building on Hochschild's analysis, Gubrium (1989) shifts the focus from expectations to the
actual labor involved in emotion work and characterizes emotion work as a craft. Common to these approaches is the attempt to construct
emotion work as an integral part of women's and men's jobs.
These aspects of emotion work are particularly hidden in jobs that involve extensions of women's domestic responsibilities (Daniels 1987).
Often considered a natural part of women's work, the skill and effort in emotion work is not acknowledged. Aronson and Neysmith, for
example, study home care workers and note that emotional and practical work are inseparable in caring work. In fact, emotional labor is
frequently recognized as an integral part of the job by both caregivers and care receivers, yet there is "little space accorded to these in
[home care workers'] job descriptions . . . [and workers are] not officially compensated for such time and effort" (1996, 67). Through an
analysis of child care workers, Rutman similarly notes that their competence and expertise as caregivers is seldom recognized, and that
future child care policy should rethink concepts of caring work so that "the more invisible, relational dimensions of caregiving are fully
and formally recognized" (1996, 646).
In response to these compelling arguments lor the need for broader definitions of work, Wright (1995) develops a model of work that
attempts to move away from conventional dual-spheres approaches. On the basis of the experiences of rural women, she argues that labor
can be conceptualized as a multidimensional continuum that ranges from formal labor market work, to informal sector work, to unpaid
household work. Wright argues that such an approach allows us to understand work as not only that which generates a wage but as that
which "generates benefits for women and their families" (1995, 231; see also Mies 1986).
THE POLITICS OF THE BROADER DEFINITION OF WORK
Underlying all these attempts to broaden the definition of work is the recognition of the negative consequences of a narrow view of the
activities in which women engage. First, as Waring (1995) notes, women may spend every minute of the day looking after the needs of
their families, and yet they are recorded by national economists as "unproductive," "unoccupied," and "at leisure." This not only distorts
and devalues much of women's work but also assumes that no assistance needs to be provided to women, and, as Glazer notes, "promote[s]
the view of women as a `sponge,' capable of absorbing new responsibilities without dropping old ones" (1993, 12). Second, the exclusion
of many of women's activities from definitions of work supports the dichotomization of social life into "public" and "private" spheres,
which, in turn, entrenches distinctions between "productive workers (men doing "real" work for wages) and nonproductive workers
(women supporting, raising, and rehabilitating those real workers)" (Daniels 1987, 404). Third, women themselves do not treat these
activities as work. Although women who do caring work, for example, may realize that their activities require time, skill, and planning,
they lack a language for calling these activities work (Aronson and Neysmith 1996; DeVault 1991), especially in the context of the lack of
societal recognition of these activities (Connelly and Armstrong 1992). This is augmented by societal assumptions that women have an
"inherent" propensity toward these activities and they are women's natural responsibility (Aronson 1992; DeVault 1991; Fishman 1982).
While much of the feminist literature to date has focused on the need to broaden the definitions of work, relatively little attention has been
focused on the processes through which current restrictive notions of work continue to be maintained and reproduced. Underlying some
explanations for why women themselves do not label many of their activities as work is a construction of women as reactors to, rather than
creators of, new meanings of work.
I argue instead that women's resistance to call certain of their activities "work" must be taken seriously. Its significance does not lie in their
reluctance to use the word work. Rather, the fact that women sometimes construct boundaries between different forms of work suggests
that they do not wish to place their various activities into a single conceptual category. Hence, it is not the naming of this category that is
of interest here but rather women's assumption that such a common category would allow for a lack of recognition of the value of their
family and caring responsibilities.
Resistance is conceptualized in the context of this article as women's avoidance of particular strategies of empowerment, many of which
have been identified in the feminist literature. Collins notes the importance of recognizing women's multiple strategies of resistance, not
only warfare and revolt but also "doing something that `is not expected'" (1990, 92; see also Hochschild 1983). In a related fashion,
Ribbens draws attention to the importance of women's lack of response to questions posed by a researcher. She notes, for example, that to
ask, " `Did you plan to have your first child?' is to ask something women may not wish to answer unambiguously," signaling the
inappropriateness of the language of rational planning for discussions on family life (1994, 60). These comments are mindful of the need
to do research and consider the consequences of proposed theoretical directions starting from the everyday experiences of women.
Teleworkers in the present sample are highly paid salaried employees who work at home. Insofar as the physical location of their work
and other activities is the same (the home), and that they have a high degree of autonomy in how they organize their work, they themselves
create the boundary around the concept of work. Teleworkers reproduce and maintain notions of work on a daily basis. For all teleworkers
in the present study, work at home is a voluntary arrangement; many of these women have actively lobbied their employers to be allowed
to work at home, and they believe that their work and family lives are greatly enhanced by telework. While the experiences of this group
cannot be generalized to all workers, they provide insight into how the concept of work might be broadened and raise questions as well
about its desirability.
METHOD
The Sample
Open-ended interviews were conducted between July 1993 and June 1994 with 30 female teleworkers living in Toronto, Ottawa, and
Montreal. ' A snowball method was used to locate teleworkers, and individuals who met certain criteria were included in the study. Only
those who were salaried employees of companies were interviewed. This criteria ensured a homogeneity in the employment conditions of
the respondents. In addition, the sample for the present study was limited to individuals who were in occupations that were traditionally
office based; this allowed respondents to compare their experience of working at home and working in a central office (e.g., academics or
real estate agents were excluded). Teleworkers doing overtime work at home were also excluded from the sample; only those who worked
at home in lieu of office-based work were interviewed. Since these women worked at home during traditional work hours, they regularly
structured their lives to accommodate their paid work activities within their homes.
Within these criteria, attempts were made to achieve a degree of heterogeneity within the sample. Women from 16 different organizations
(in both the public and private sectors) were interviewed; they performed a variety of jobs in management (business managers, project
managers), administration (auditors, researchers, editors), natural and applied sciences (computer programmers, systems analysts), and
sales (marketing representatives, sales representatives).2 Three women in the sample did paid work for less than 30 hours a week; the
remainder worked full-time. On average, these teleworkers earned Can$50,000 a year, although their incomes ranged from Can$21,000 to
Can$77,000.
In terms of demographic characteristics, the sample was similarly varied. Half of the women were between 35 and 44 years old, a little
more than one-quarter were below 35, and the remainder were over 44 years of age. Only 6 percent of the sample were "visible
minorities." While this represents a significant limitation of the sample, it also underscores the fundamental differences between this group
of workers and "homeworkers" (pieceworkers) who are predominantly immigrant women (Johnson and Johnson 1982). Two-thirds of the
women in the sample were living with their partners; almost all of these were in dual-earner families. Nineteen of the 30 women
interviewed had children, and 14 of these women had children aged 6 and under. Four women were providing elder care.
About one-third of the cohabiting women in the sample say that they have spouses who share equally in the domestic work. Despite this, it
was women who continued to be responsible for managing child care arrangements. Only three women (all doing part-time paid work)
provided child care or elder care while they were engaged in paid work; the remainder had day care or home care workers to provide care
for part of the day.
The Interviews
Individuals who met the criteria were contacted and asked to participate in an interview about their teleworking experiences. All
interviews were voluntary, and respondents were ensured confidentiality. On average, interviews lasted about 90 minutes and were
conducted in person, in teleworkers' homes, at their central offices, or in restaurants. An "interview guide approach" was used, where the
general topics and issues to be covered were determined in advance, but the exact wording and sequence of the questions were decided in
the course of the interview (Patton 1990, 228). This method allowed me to "create space for the respondents to provide accounts rooted in
the realities of their lives" (DeVault 1990, 98). The interview guide contained five sections: Work ]History (how individuals came to be
teleworking), Nature of Work (job tasks and a "typical" day), Strengths and Weakness of Telework, Effects on Personal Li.fe
(relationships with family members and friends, division of household responsibility), and Plans for the Future. Often I found that
individuals' responses to the opening question of each interview (on how they came to be teleworking) provided the structure for the order
in which I would raise the issues on the interview guide. Respondents were asked to complete a short demographic questionnaire at the
end of the interview. All interviews were tape-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and coded in-depth (Strauss and Corbin 1990). A computer
software package (The Ethnograph) was used to aid in the later part of the data analysis.
PROTECTING "WORK"
In the beginning of this research project, I expected to come across examples of women broadening the definition of work. These women
had chosen to work at home to ease the stress they attributed to office-based work. Many experienced severe time constraints with office-
based work; as one woman says, "you can't slip five minutes this way or that because it can throw everybody off." I expected these women
to demand a recognition of the real work involved in fulfilling their domestic and child care responsibilities. In lobbying their employers to
introduce telework policies, these women were demanding such recognition, yet, once at home, teleworkers set up extremely rigid
distinctions between what they called their work and their household responsibilities; in :fact, they narrowed the meaning of work to
include only a small group of activities directly related to measurable work goals. Consequently, this project looks at why and how women
do telework and how they resist the broadening of the definition of work.
"The Laundry Sort of Happens Itself"-Doing Family Work
Teleworkers' experiences provide vivid illustrations of the nuanced and multifaceted nature of the family work done by women. Although
most of the women with children or elderly relatives do not provide child care or elder care during the paid workday, they stress that
working at home allows them to effectively care for, as well as care about (Abel and Nelson 1990), their families. Caring for their families
often involves being able to provide occasional care for a sick child (this "caring for" clearly cannot be neatly separated from "caring
about"). As one woman with two school-age children says, "not worrying is [a] big asset for me. Being far away [at the central office] I
was always worried that I was not there when the kids got up in the morning [especially] if they had a temperature." Women appreciate the
ability to work at home, making them accessible for the provision of such care. It also means, however, that they do not need to take leave
to meet these obligations. A woman with a two-year-old child says, "if my daughter got sick . . . then instead of a totally wasted day, I
have . . . some things that could keep me busy while she's sleeping." Caring also sometimes involves the restructuring of paid work times
around family time, as one woman with a 1-year-old says:
I have staggered my hours so that I still sort of get to do Mom things. I work from 7:00 in the morning until about 1:00, and I take [my
child] to day care during that time. And then I pick him up and we have the afternoon. When my husband gets home, I carry on working in
the evening.
Aside from caring for their children in these ways, women spoke extensively about how telework allows them to care about their families.
This caring about involves being part of the significant moments of their children's lives (and indeed creating these moments as
significant). One woman says,
I can walk my daughter to school and talk to her teacher, which I normally [when I do not telework] don't have time to do... If there is an
assembly at school and I want to take an hour and go watch my kids sing in the Christmas concert, I can do that.
Another woman with a 16-year-old daughter notes, "If I have a special occasion . . . my daughter wants to go shopping. Well, I'll take an
afternoon and I'll go shopping with her. I'll work that night, or another night," Hochschild characterizes families as having a "sacred core
of private rituals and shared meanings" and "secondary zones of less important daily, weekly, seasonal rituals which back up these core
rituals" (1996, 20). Together these form "the ritual core of family life" (1996, 21). She argues that with work-family speed up, fewer
family rituals get accomplished. In talking to teleworkers, however, I saw little evidence of the fact that their family lives were becoming
deritualized. Instead, teleworkers seem to consciously and continuously recreate family rituals. One woman, for example, says that with
telework, her relationship to her two school-age children has changed: "I see them grow . . . I can give them a kiss in the morning now
which I couldn't do before . . . I can check on them-how they dress, see what they eat, check their lunch boxes." Another woman says,
I get to have breakfast with my kids [before they go to day care] . . . it is a lot more relaxed [and] leisurely. You get to spend some time
together. I usually pick them up by 4:30 or 5:00 and they can help me make dimler and we can do things together.
In fact, this reaffirmation of family life often involves creating as much houseworkfree family time as possible. Work around laundry is
particularly rescheduled. One woman, who does part-time paid work while caring for her two pre-school children, says, "I'm trying to get
away from [leaving the laundry till the weekends] . . . so that Saturdays are for the family. Saturday and Sunday are for the family to live
together." Another woman who does full-time telework and has three school-age children says,
I don't do my spring cleaning in the middle of the day. . but I do enough to keep on top of everything.... Laundry's mostly done ... then
there's ironing.... Whereas before [I started teleworking] the whole weekend[ you just dreaded because you would have to do it all.
It is clear, therefore, that these women perceive telework as a strategy through which they can ease some of the pressure of their "double
day of labor" (Hamilton 1996, 174). At the same time, teleworkers do not label the care they provide for their families as work. For
example, some women talk about the family work they do as a "break" from work. One woman caring for a teenage son and a parent says,
"Sometimes you need a break. . . I might go out and water the garden . . . or I may go down and put a load of washing in the laundry . . or I
might go and do my mother's hair, she's [sick] . . . so the breaks that I take are things that I have to do anyways." Another woman notes,
"Sometimes I just need a break . . . it's kind of relaxing because you accomplish the [wash and vacuum] and it gets your mind off work."
The effort involved in coordinating and doing family work is de-emphasized and defined as "no big deal." One woman says, "When I take
a break, the laundry room is just next door. I can do a load of laundry-it's no big deal. I can sweep the floor . . . supper is no longer a
struggle." Another notes, "I can't stop and do [all] the housework, but the laundry sort of happens itself." Often teleworkers compare the
time it takes them to do this work to the time they "waste" in the office environment. One woman who began to telework four months ago
says,
I have no difficulty in justifying working at my desk [at home] and I hear that the washing machine is done and putting [the clothes] in the
dryer. Because in my mind . . . I know . . . that [at the central office] going down for coffee takes me seven minutes and that is not even
considered a break.
Three points arise from this evidence of teleworkers' family work. First, although teleworkers do not refer to their household activities as
"work" (calling them "breaks" which help them to "relax"), they also do not refer to these activities as leisure (they are things that one has
to "accomplish" or "do anyways"). Hargreaves notes that leisure has historically been defined as "the polar opposite" (1989:136) of paid
employment serving primarily to refresh workers so that they can return to their jobs. Parallel to the masculine work norm is a masculine
leisure norm within which little attention is paid to the ways in which unpaid family work affects individuals' experience of leisure (Deem
1990; Wearing and Wearing 1988). In this context, teleworking women define their family work neither as "work" nor as that which
replenishes them for work. Family work occupies an "in-between space" (Doucet and Mirchandani 1997) for which there is little
language outside of the discourses of work or leisure.
Second, given that these women adopt and lobby for the opportunity to work at home specifically so that they can do family work, it is
worth exploring why they avoid using the common label of "work" to refer to both paid and family activities. Their reluctance to broaden
the definition of work to include the in-between space that family work occupies suggests that women may not perceive the broadening of
the definition of work as a strategy that will automatically result in the greater validation of their family work. Glazer notes that while
social theorists often attempt to treat socially valued activities as work in an attempt to gain respect for those who perform these activities,
the relabeling of activities as work can serve little use with little change in the material conditions of life (1993, 36-37). In fact,
teleworkers' reluctance to label their family work as work suggests that there may be certain dangers accompanying the expansive
definition of work.
Teleworking women frequently maintain the boundaries between their paid and family work and identify several "costs" that would
accompany the dissolution of these boundaries. Women mention, for example, the need to reinforce the separateness of paid and family
work to control the extent to which their paid work "invades" their family activities. One woman with pre-school children says, "You're
never away from your work [when you work at home] . . . I felt that I was on duty twenty-four hours a day . . . you felt that because you
worked from home, they could invade your life anytime they wanted." Another woman with a one-yearold son notes,
I was feeling very keenly a sense of intrusion into my house. I had my . . . family around me and my work was a bothersome knock at the
door . . . couriers showing up, a telephone line ringing, a fax machine going in the middle of the night . . . [I thought] that this was not . . .
a pristine environment, that I had sullied it . . . I think I really wanted to feel that there was some place 1 could hide and be with my family
. . . I want[ed] this house to be ours, not part of my work.
A woman who works as a program assistant said she preferred to check her voice mail on her office phone rather than giving her home
telephone number out because, "I think there are a lot of people who would abuse [having my home telephone number]. I would be getting
calls at 9:00 at night because some catastrophe has happened [which] . . . could have very easily been dealt with in the morning."
By maintaining a separation between their paid and family work, women also challenge the assumption that they can do paid work while
simultaneously caring for their children. One woman notes that she routinely receives phone calls from colleagues at home, even on days
when she is officially on leave. Describing one such day when her daughter was sick, she says,
It was just like Grand Central Station in here . . . it was stressful . . . my daughter [was] crying in the background. . . and I had three
different people from work wanting input from me . . . they figure I'm here and if it's just going to take a minute then I won't mind too
much . That was the one day I finally said this is too much.
She partly blames herself for this situation, though, saying it arose because "I want to be a bit flexible too because [the work has to
continue even if] I'm not available . . . so I kind of let the boundary slip. . and there were some that were taking advantage of that."
Not only do women maintain the boundary between paid and family work to control the extent to which they are assumed to be endlessly
available to their colleagues; they also do so to diminish the negative effect of the location of paid work in their homes on members of
their family. One woman, for example, says that she does not accept calls after a certain time or have meetings at home. She has a 13-year-
old son, and says,
When he comes in at about 3:30 . . . I don't want to be on a conference call, or have people there [because]. . . he might bring his friends
home. . I don't want to disallow him to have his family life . . . I don't want to, make it a business environment for [him].
Another woman says that she avoids working outside of business hours, because "if [your family is] sitting down at the kitchen table and
you want everybody to shut up because you're working every night. . . I don't think it would be fair to them."
In these ways, although teleworkers do both paid and unpaid work when they work at home, they maintain a boundary between these two
types of activities. They do this, it can be seen, to resist assumptions made by their supervisors and colleagues that they are "endlessly
available to work" (Seron and Ferris 1995, 23) and that their home is an extension of the organization. These assumptions are no doubt
augmented by the fact that teleworkers are continually present at their workplaces (their homes).
Teleworkers' need to "protect" the intrusion of the organization into their family lives coexists with their need to constantly stress the
legitimacy of the paid work that they do in their homes. Nearly all teleworking women interviewed noted that they are often perceived by
friends, family, and even colleagues to not be working because they do their paid work in the sphere traditionally associated with leisure.
They feel that they are perceived as "having a day off," "being on holidays," "goofing off," "getting away with something," "watching
soaps," "doing a woman's thing," "being in weekend mode," "being on vacation," and "cheating." In the context of this perception of
telework, women have to constantly legitimize their paid work activities and label them as reaL work. One woman, whose parents are in a
nursing home, notes, "Because I'm at home they don't understand that I still have a job." Another woman, who had been teleworking for
about a year, recounts the typical reaction of her peers to her arrangement: "You meet somebody you haven't seen for months and they say,
'I haven't seen you for a while. What happened to you?' and you say, 'I work at home.' And they go, `Aren't you lucky. You can watch TV.
You can clean. You can cook.' "Other women wonder if their colleagues think that they are, in fact, caring for their families while
teleworking; a mother of a one-year-old worries that her colleagues may be saying, "she's a Mom. The kid's probably home. They're
playing and she's not doing anything."
Teleworkers' comments reveal that broadening the definition of work to include family work clearly has accompanying costs. As this
discussion reveals, teleworkers face the continuing threat of being perceived by their coworkers as always available to fulfill
organizational needs or, simultaneously, as illegitimate organizational members. Teleworking women protect: the boundary of work as a
way to control both of these threats.
A third point about teleworkers' family work relates to the nature of the "double bind" that arises from their "double day" (Gannage 1986).
While teleworkers perceive certain costs associated with broadening the definition of work to include family work, they simultaneously
recognize the limitations of conventionally held narrow definitions of work that assume that work is separate from the rest of life, that it
has first claim on the worker, and that caring for families is "outside job and organizational boundaries" (Acker 1992, 257). Indeed, the
experiences of teleworking women suggest that women's strategies of managing their double days often involve choices between
imperfect solutions. By avoiding the label of work to refer to their family work, teleworkers often maintain the invisibility of the skill and
planning that these activities involve. If they were to not avoid this label, however, they would risk diminishing the seriousness with which
their paid work is treated by colleagues, friends, and family. In the same way, by avoiding the label of work for their family work,
teleworkers reinforce the notion of the home as an essentially private, extraorganizational space. On the other hand, if they were to stress
the continuity of their paid and unpaid work, they would face the risk of exposing their homes to continual organizational intervention.
Indeed, teleworkers' experiences reinforce Christensen's observation that it is a "cruel illusion" that "a woman will be able to resolve [her
work and family problems] by simply changing the place where she works" (1988, 6). It is clear that women may face risks from both the
integration and the separation of the spheres.
"Things Not of a Real Work Nature"
Several theorists have focused on the central role of emotion work in "frontline service" jobs (Wharton 1993; see also Armstrong and
Armstrong 1990; Ashforth and Humphrey 1993; Hochschild 1983), many of which are in occupations predominated by women (Aronson
and Neysmith 1996; Gubrium 1989; Heimer and Stevens 1997; Rutman 1996). Certain job tasks in particular have been identified as
requiring employees to do high levels of emotion work. These include tasks involving the care of others (Aronson and Neysmith 1996),
"boundary-spanning" tasks where people represent their organizations to individuals outside the organization (Ashforth and Humphrey
1993, 90; Fineman 1996, 555), tasks that involve voice or facial contact with others or close collaboration with work teams (Hochschild
1983, 144; Van Maanen and Kunda 1989, 56), or tasks in which employees are expected to "foster a particular emotional climate during
occupational interactions" (Erickson and Wharton 1997, 191).
The teleworkers interviewed for the present study do not occupy frontline service roles; their jobs do, however, involve interactions with
colleagues, supervisors, or customers. Their experiences shed light on the ways in which certain activities become defined as peripheral
even if important to many jobs. In changing the context within which they do their paid work from a central office to the home,
teleworkers "name" various aspects of emotion work and recognize that they do not do these tasks in the same ways when they work at
home. Interestingly, they go on to argue that these tasks are, in fact, not part of their jobs, even though they are important. In this way,
these women clearly identify interaction and emotion work as important but do not broaden definitions of work to include these activities.
The reasons for this exclusion are explored throughout this section.
Teleworkers frequently compare their experiences of doing their paid work at a central office and doing this same work at home and
identify most types of on-the-job interaction and emotion work as "waste." This waste includes social interaction with their colleagues as
well as ad hoc meetings on work issues. One teleworker, who works two days a week at home, says that in the office, "I feel like I've . . .
wasted time . . . I bumped into you in the hall and we chatted about something or I went down for a coffee . . . you just feel that was a
waste." Another woman similarly notes that in the office,
Everybody. . . is talking out in the hall and the photocopier is there and the fax is there and people congregate and talk about everything
but work. And the people beside me [are] ... asking me questions and it's hard to concentrate.... There is nothing wrong with being face to
face with somebody. . but a lot of it is unnecessary.
Some women also recognize that emotion in the workplace often takes the form of office politics. One woman said that she asked to work
at home because she was having difficulties in her personal life and in the office "there is a lot of politics, gossip. It's just annoying."
Another woman notes that "when things become very political or heated in an office environment .. I like being a teleworker because I can
avoid that." Wadel (1979) argues that the maintenance of a work community often requires effort and this effort is frequently trivialized.
Accordingly, these forms of interaction in the office environment are largely conceptualized as hindering women's ability to do their "real
jobs." Women clearly recognize that these are the unpaid and unrecognized aspects of their jobs. As one woman working as a systems
analyst says, "I classify my work as a developmental role . . . I don't get any of that done when I'm here [at the office], I'm usually talking
to people. . . people are walking by and they ask questions they could have easily found out themselves." Another woman working as a
consultant notes, "Our job is supposed to be strategic in design. That's what we're supposed to get paid for . . . a small proportion of it is
supposed to be interruptions and day-to-day support." In their attempts to define the emotion work they do on the job as "waste,"
teleworkers resist the expectation that they should automatically perform various caring and relational activities for their employers. They
recognize that this work largely benefits the organization. As one woman (an Editor) put it,
[Being at home] allowed me to get further ahead than anybody else in the office because I wasn't being slowed down by meetings . . . not
going to meetings enabled me to get as far ahead as I did in planning and organizing my own work . . . the meeting wasn't contributing. . .
to my production, but my presence at the meeting was contributing to a general sense of coherence in the organization.
This reluctance to perform such activities does not suggest that all teleworkers identify emotion work on the job as unimportant. The
woman quoted above, for example, goes on to say,
The random corridor encounters with people that say-"God, I'd like your opinion on this"-that's part of what makes my heart beat . . . as a
professional . . . it's not just the fulfillment of. . work that you feel contributes to the world . . . it's hanging out at the water cooler with
your colleagues.
This tension between defining social interactions as both important and not part of their jobs is expressed by a sales trainee in these terms:
For me, personally it [social interactions with colleagues] happens to be a very important thing . . . you have to believe that is part of your
job description whether it's written down on a piece of paper or not. I recognize the value of human contact on a nonbusiness level as
being helpful to me business- ise as well as personal[ly]. So it has to be a conscious effort.
When she worked in the office environment, however, this woman says that she was so busy trying to get her work tasks completed that "I
didn't feel that I had the energy level or anything valuable to contribute in terms of socializing at the office." Now working at home for
four days a week, she says that when she does go to the office, "I make the time for . . . that socializing. Because I have a certainty about
the other tasks that I have to perform and how they are well organized. I feel comfortable, I feel safe, I feel secure about taking the time to
talk to people." While recognizing that social interaction should be seen as part of the job description, this woman also clearly recognizes
that she needs to be "secure" about having her other job tasks organized before taking the time to "`contribute" to the socializing at the
workplace.
Teleworkers do not, it can be seen, lobby for these tasks to be formally recognized as part of their work. Generally extremely positive
about telework, they strive to have more, rather than less, of their jobs definable within the terms of clearly measurable outcomes, since it
is these tasks that can most easily be supervised remotely. These women seem to recognize that the inclusion of thus far "invisible" work
into definitions of work could be used to bolster organizational resistance to telework.
They describe much of this resistance to telework as evidence of the prevalence of an "old school" of management within which employee
visibility is a precondition to effective supervision. One woman with a long commute to the workplace asked to telework two years ago.
She notes, however, that
there is a very big amount of trust involved in letting a person work at home from a supervisor's point of view and a lot of old-style
managerS[do not like it] if they can't see you working. It's a very look, see, feel type of attitude that a lot of people have.
Another woman says, "Some people think that to manage, they have to see the person." Many women are also aware that some ot their
peers are resistant to work-at-home arrangements because they perceive teleworkers as less available to do emotion work on the job (rather
than because teleworkers Porkers are less productive in terms of their measurable work outputs). One women says, for example, "I find in
a work group people like to see your face . . . I'm not exactly sure [why, but that is how] they assess your value to the team." Another notes
that some people at her office "expect to be able to go to [her] desk and they're not used to somebody not being there." Knowing that her
ability to work: at home is dependent on approval from those at her workplace, one woman who lobbied for months to be allowed to work
at home notes,
[Some of my peers] think. . if you want to work, [you should]be prepared to come into the office like the rest of us and spend the time on
the highway. . . [so] one of the things that I've tried to do . . . is to minimize any inconvenience and disruption to people back at the office-
like the support staff and my supervisors. . . I'm trying to minimize that because I figure if it becomes an inconvenience for someone. . .
people are going to resent it and management may say "no."
While teleworkers recognize the importance of emotion work on the job, therefore, they also realize that such work, to the many "old-style
managers" who surround them and to some of their peers, could be seen as a justification to require employees' presence at the workplace.
Teleworkers' emphatic identification of emotion work as "waste" therefore serves as a strategy through which they protect their ability to
work at home.
The exclusion of certain activities from work also gives teleworkers the opportunity to recreate emotion work on the job on their own
terms. In this, they challenge the notion that emotion work requires their physical presence at the workplace. Several teleworkers who feel
that emotion work may not be part of their jobs but remains important develop their own methods of interacting remotely with their peers.
One woman who never goes into a central office says, "I have found a way of compensating for [not having the interaction] . . . I just pick
up the phone and talk to [one of the people I work with] about things that have nothing to do with the job. And we'll talk for 10 minutes. . .
and that's my office chitchat." Another woman notes,
When you transfer expertise. . . to other individuals and go back and forth, you're giving them ideas creatively . . . that's kind of a hidden
thing but [being at home and not having that] I could see that being a potential problem. . . I decided one day. . maybe it is up to me. So I
stated phoning and asking questions [even for small things].... They got used to me [just] phoning.
In a situation where receiving formal recognition of aspects of their work often also involves greater organizational control over their work
situations, women resist rather than promote such a strategy.
The experiences of teleworking women suggest that there is a need for reflection on the different strategies that facilitate the recognition of
work done by women in various occupations. For the women in the sample of teleworkers interviewed, broadening the definition of
"work" to include emotion work affords little benefit and may potentially curtail their ability to choose their place of work. For women in
jobs in which caring work is central, such as home care work, elder care, or nursing, the need for the inclusion and appropriate
remuneration of emotion work may outweigh the risks that teleworkers highlight. While most theoretical reflection on emotion work to
date has focused on frontline service jobs, the present research suggests that there is much to be gained from comparisons between
emotion work done by these and other groups of workers. In particular, comparisons between women in different occupations may reveal
that their strategies to gain recognition for their work may not only be diverse but also sometimes contradictory (where advances made by
one group of women may not represent advances for all women).
CONCLUSION
This article has focused on some of the difficulties associated with expanding the concept of work. While the broadening of the definition
of work may challenge the devaluation of women's lives, such a broadening also involves the placing of various activities into a common
category. Through an analysis of the experiences of teleworkers, it is clear that women themselves sometimes resist an expansive notion of
work. First, women are wary of the organizational intrusion into family life that may accompany the closer association between paid work
and family or emotion work. Second, women are unable and unwilling to compromise the legitimacy of their paid work, which has often
been achieved through much struggle; they view the loss of this legitimacy as a real cost to drawing attention to their other work activities.
Third, women recognize that emotion work in the office can sometimes take the form of office politics and harassment, and they see this
as wasteful. Fourth, teleworkers worry that a greater recognition of emotion work on the job may be used as justification for greater
management control over their activities, which would give them less individual freedom to determine their work settings.
The empirical evidence suggests the need for reaffirmation of the importance of context in theoretical debates on the broadening of the
definition of work and the recognition that different experiences of oppression for women are likely to give rise to different, and
sometimes contradictory, conceptions of liberation (Ramazanoglu 1989). Several projects require future research attention. Two
comparative studies are important, one comparing women working in service and nonservice occupations, and a second comparing women
of color or women of lower socioeconomic status doing home-based piecework and predominantly white, highly paid teleworkers.
More discussion is needed on the redefinition of work to include the invisible work done by women. Indeed, to talk of women's resistances
to the broadening of work is really to explore the mechanisms that keep the masculine work norm in place. While much feminist theory
has focused on the need to broaden what we call work, the experiences of teleworking women suggest that more reflection is needed on
the interrelated structures through which narrow definitions of work are maintained and reproduced, and the risks that might sometimes
accompany a more expansive notion of work.
[Footnote]
NOTES
[Footnote]
1. For this project, interviews were conducted with both female and male teleworkers. This article, however, focuses only on the
interviews with women. This is primarily because I am interested in how teleworkers define work in the context of the fact that they
assume primary responsibility for the family activities of domestic work and child care.
2. Teleworkers jobs can be broadly classified as professional work. Seron and Ferris (1995) argue that distinguishing features of
professional work are autonomy and control over work, and given that these conditions accurately describe teleworkers' jobs, their work
can be defined as professional.

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[Author note]
KIRAN MIRCHANDANI
St. Mary's University, Canada

[Author note]
AUTHOR'S NOTE: A version of this article was presented as a paper at the 1997 annual meeting of the American Sociological
Association in Toronto. I would like to th,nk Peta Tancred for her guidance throughout this research project, as well as Nona Y Glazer,
Janet M. Hunt, and Beth E. Schneider for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

[Author note]
REPRINT REQUESTS: Kiran Mirchandani, Department of Management, St. Mary's University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada B3H 3C3;
e-mail:kmirchan@shark.stmarys.ca.

[Author note]
Kiran Mirchandani is on the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada's (SSHRC)postdoctoral fellowship in the
department of management at St. Mary's University. She holds a PhD. in sociology from McGill University and has published articles on
gender and work. Her current research is on home-based business ownership in Atlantic Canada.