Two years after it was written, 'Teleworking in Local Government: assessing the costs and benefits' has finally been published by the Local Government Management Board.

This report starts from the recognition that teleworking is an issue which impacts on local government in a variety of different ways. It assesses the costs and benefits of teleworking to a local authority in its capacity as an employer, as a deliverer of front-line services to local communities, as a planning authority, as a provider of education and training and as an agent of local economic development. It argues that the development of telematics makes it possible for local authorities to reinvent their role and means of operation in ways that have the potential to reshape not only the working lives of employees but also the quality of life in whole communities.

The report costs £15 for Local Authorities in England and Wales, £19.50 for registered charities, and £30 for everyone else. Further details can be obtained from David Maycock at the LGMB, david.maycock@lgmb.gov.uk, telephone: +44 171 296 6756, fax: +44 171 296 6523

Good Research on Teleworking

A couple of days ago we were called by a student who had just been told by his internal PhD supervisor that his research on teleworking (which seemed, from his description, to be both rigorous and original) had insufficient references to articles in refereed academic journals. He was ringing, poor man, to find out what the relevant academic journals might be, and how he could track down these articles. We receive many other similar requests.

Whilst I would be the first to agree that much of what purports to be 'research' on teleworking is nothing but hype, bad journalism, plagiarism or anecdote embellished with fashionable catch-phrases, the assumption that whatever resides in academic journals is automatically 'good' is mind-bendingly misguided. In fact it makes me so angry that it is difficult not to get side-tracked into a lengthy diatribe. I will content myself with a few points to explain this position, but have relegated these to the end of the newsletter (see below, if you are interested).

Having said that, there are some very good researchers doing excellent and original research on various aspects of teleworking, some of which IS published in academic journals.

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. 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. Like Salaff's, his approach is thorough, level-headed and pragmatic.

One of the most interesting qualitative researchers is Nicola Armstrong, based at Massey University in New Zealand. She has 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.

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 Women's Studies Department at Stockholm University, 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, send a message c/o Analytica and I will forward it on your behalf.

Teleworking Links

In the meanwhile, 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. However he is in the consultancy business which means that he cannot afford to give too much information away for free and a lot 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.

Globalisation

We're still doing a lot of thinking about globalisation. In particular, about how, if at all the new global division of labour in services can be mapped and measured. In December, we finished our part of a major study for the International Labour Organisation which developed a methodology for working out which kinds of countries are likely to attract which kinds of information-processing activities. Despite an enormous amount of number-crunching (thanks to Nick Jagger, of the Institute for Employment Studies) we cannot claim that this project is complete and we are hoping to refine it further in the future. The report is not yet published, but details will be announced in this newsletter as soon as they become available.

It looks as though the UN University Institute of Technology are finally going to get round to publishing the proceedings of the 1996 conference at which I first proposed the need for such research, in a paper entitled 'Beyond Anecdotes: on Quantifying Globalisation in Information-Processing Work'. Again, watch this space.

One article which has now been published is a piece entitled 'Material World: the Myth of the Weightless Economy' in Socialist Register, 1999. This article offers a critique of the notion that the economy is becoming more knowledge-intensive with added value coming increasingly from dematerialised activities. It argues that, on the contrary, the major world trend is commodification, with an ever-increasing production of material goods which have to physically (and energy-intensively) transported around the globe. It also discusses the measurement of 'knowledge work' and the 'productivity paradox'. In doing so, it draws heavily on the under-recognised work of Henry Neuburger who died suddenly in December, 1998. We are immeasurably the poorer for his loss. This issue of Socialist Register, edited by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys was also one of the last publications to be put through the press by Martin Eve who died in November. Under his direction, Merlin Press (many of whose titles were published in the United States by Monthly Review Press) did much to sustain a British tradition of thoughtful, non-sectarian progressive publishing during the dark Thatcher years. The same issue also contains an excellent overview of the literature on globalisation by Hugo Radice

New Work

In addition to this research on globalisation, we are also developing a programme of work on call centre employment at the Institute for Employment Studies, some of it in collaboration with the Telecottage Association.

Virtual Walks

Those of you who take an interest in our 'virtual walks' may have noticed a couple of recent additions. We have now experimented with three different ways of combining images with a small amount of explanatory text. The problem is, of course, that the images download so much more slowly than the text that there is a danger of the words telling you what to think about the picture before you have seen it. Most people seem to think that the approach adopted in the Canadian walk is more successful than the Finnish or UK ones, but we'd still like to hear other views. To take a look, go here. There are more walks on their way.

A Digression about Academic Publishing (see above)

Just a few notes:

• First, the only people who stand to gain anything at all from publishing in such journals are full-time academics who see it as a route to advancement. Academic journals do not pay their authors and are so slow that it can take anything up to three years for an article to get published. If it is any good, the material can be published as a book (for which the author gets paid!) in a fraction of the time. If the research was commissioned then it will probably have been published by the client in any case. I think it was Phil Agre who said that academic journals are a way of stealing the intellectual property of academics and selling it back to them at inflated prices. Some of us who write and research for a living, and are members of bodies like the Authors Lending and Copyright Society, or the National Union of Journalists or the Society of Authors still regard this form of publishing as appropriation of intellectual property and refuse to publish in these journals as a matter of principle, especially when they are owned by large and ruthless multinational corporations (let us not forget that Robert Maxwell made his first fortune publishing such journals).

• Second, words like 'teleworking' were developed in order to try to capture some of the ambiguity and dynamism of the changes taking place in the structure of work which coincided with the introduction of various information and communications technologies. To reify teleworking, pin it down and try to fix it in place and time is to deny this very dynamism. Furthermore, the subject lies at the intersection of a range of different academic disciplines and there is no single approach which captures all facets of its development, although the Swedish concept of 'work science' perhaps comes closer than most. Despite some attempts to invent a new subject of 'teleworking studies', the most interesting research has been carried out within established disciplines, drawing on, and where necessary adapting, existing bodies of theory, including psychology, transport economics, industrial geography, ergonomics, organisational theory, gender studies, the sociology of work, systems theory, development studies and so on. There is thus no obvious academic 'place' to locate such articles.

• Third, the very concept of 'peer review' seems to me to be dangerously normative and likely to exclude any really radical and original thinking. In practice, groups of 'peers' form and reform as little self-justifying coteries. If you find that your work is being judged a little harshly, or not understood by an existing group of 'peers', then the thing to do seems to be to organise a conference or two with a bunch of like-minded friends and start a new journal where you can review each other's articles to your heart's content and, by the time you've all got your professorships, start excluding the next generation. Any genuinely revolutionary thinker who comes along will, almost by definition, fall outside the scope of any of these groups because he or she will be making new connections between things formerly regarded as disparate.

All contents of this newsletter are copyright © Ursula Huws, 1999. However you are free to pass it on to anyone for non-commercial purposes provided the text, including this copyright notice, is not changed.

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