We are often asked to recommend good sources of academic research on teleworking. We will be updating this page regularly, but here are a few names to start with:

One of the best is California-based Patricia Mokhtarian who has done some very interesting work on telecommunications/transportation substitution, some of which has been published in various journals of transport economics. Many of her publications can be downloaded from her web-site: http://www.engr.ucdavis.edu/~its/telecom/publist.html

In the field of industrial geography, some of the most thought-provoking work is going on at the Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies (CURDS) at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the UK. Like most people who rely on contract research for their income, these researchers have a tendency to recycle parts of their old reports several times over, but which of us is entirely innocent of this, when right up against a deadline?

There are a number of other university-based researchers carrying out good empirical work. In Canada, Janet Salaff, at the Sociology Department of the University of Toronto, has done some thorough company case-studies. Bill Michelson, in the same department has used time-budget data derived from the Candian Census of Population to produce, for the first time, a detailed analysis of teleworking based on a truly representative sample. Fascinating work, but not yet published.

In Australia, I rate highly the work of Peter Standen, at the department of Business, Legal Services and Public Administration at Edith Cowan University in Perth. His approach is also thorough, level-headed and pragmatic.

One of the most interesting qualitative researchers was Nicola Armstrong, based at Massey University in New Zealand, who brought a critical feminist perspective to her deep study of homeworking and family life, which included interviews with children, partners and childcare workers as well as homeworkers themselves. Sadly, she passed away in 1999 leaving all too little published work behind. She did, however, contribute a chapter to a book edited by Ursula Huws and Ewa Gunnarsson, entitled Virtually Free: Gender, Work and Spatial Choice, and published by NUTEK in Stockholm, Sweden, in September, 1997

Sweden is another country where serious research has been going on ever since Ewa Gunnarsson's pioneering work with Gite Vedel at the Arbetslivcentrum in the early 1980s. Ewa is now at the Swedish Centre for Working Life, in Stockholm, still asking interesting questions about gender and working life. There is also a programme of research on teleworking at Linsköping University, some of it, under Birger Rapp's leadership, in the Computer Science Department, and some, by Lennart Sturesson, in Sociology.

I do not like to pass on people's email addresses without their permission, and realise that I have not made it easy for you to follow up these contacts. If you really get stuck tracking down their publications by other means, email us here hereand we will forward it on your behalf.

Teleworking Links

Here are the URLs of a couple of the web-sites which have the most complete lists of links related to teleworking.

http://www.pscw.uva.nl/sociosite/TOPICS/Telework.html is a website by Albert Benschop at the Sociology Department of the University of Amsterdam which appears to have been set up entirely for altruistic reasons (very rare in this field). He groups links both geographically and by subject and the last time I visited I only found one which was dead.

http://www.gilgordon.com/index.htm is the web-site of Gil Gordon who has been publishing a newsletter on telecommuting, primarily aimed at US employers, for the last fifteen years. Gil is enormously well-informed and seems to know more about what is going on internationally than almost anyone although he writes from the perspective of one who is keen to promote teleworking. He is a consultant which means that, unlike those who have a secure academic salary, he cannot afford to give everything away for free and some of the site content is 'teasers' for his newsletter. Particularly useful for research students is his 'thesis corner' which summarises doctoral research on teleworking currently in progress.

Also worth visiting is the Euro-telework website on http://www.euro-telework.org which has amassed a great deal of information on teleworking from a trade union/collective bargaining perspective.

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