Occasional newsletter from Analytica, June 1999.

New Publication - Teleworking and Globalisation

Coming out on June 28th will be the results of all that global number-crunching described in the last newsletter: a first exploratory attempt to map the new international division of labour which is emerging in telemediated information-processing work. As well as trying to explain and model national differences in the take-up of teleworking, this book also draws on a cluster analysis of over 50 indicators for 206 countries to identify likely locations for particular kinds of delocalised activities, including data entry, software development and call centres.

Further details from: http://www.employment-studies.co.uk/pubs/358.html

Coincidentally, an earlier piece, 'Beyond Anecdotes: On Quantifying the Globalisation of Information Processing Work' will be published in a collection of conference papers called 'Europe and Developing Countries in the Globalised Information Economy: Employment and Distance Education', edited by Swasti Mitter and Maria Ines Bastos and due to be published by Routledge, London and New York, on June 10, l999

The ACAS Case Study

Homeworking

After a lot of campaigning, led by the remarkable mass-membership Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA) based in Ahmedabad, India, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) now has a Convention on Homeworking (narrowly passed in 1996) but this has yet to be ratified by any country except Finland, which did so in April this year.

An interesting briefing paper on the convention has been produced by Oxfam and can be found on http://www.oneworld.org/textver/oxfam/policy/papers/ilocon.htm

The full wording of the convention is on http://www.gn.apc.org/homenet/conv.html

Other useful web-sites are that of Homenet, the international network of organisations working with homeworkers, and currently run from India by the redoubtable Jane Tate along with colleagues from SEWA. This can be found on: http://www.gn.apc.org/homenet/

In the UK, the umbrella body for homeworkers' organisations is the National Group on Homeworking (for whom I wrote 'Home Truths' in 1994, the report of a national survey carried out by NGH members). Their web-site is on: http://www.gn.apc.org/homeworking/

Isolated Workers Organising on and off the Net

Homeworkers have developed innovative forms of organisation in many parts of the world, some of which were described in a 1995 ILO publication which I edited, entitled 'Action Programmes for the Protection of Homeworkers: ten cases from around the world'. Recently, I have noticed interesting signs that homeworkers in the more developed countries have started using the internet as a means of organising.

In some cases, they are using the bulletin boards of commercial sites. The Compuserve Work-from-home Forum (http://forumsb.compuserve.com/gvforums/default.asp?srv=workfromhome) is one example. Clearly aimed at the desperate, this is full of barrel-scraping ideas for starting a home business, probably more reputable than those get-rich-quick small ads you see in downmarket newspapers (and all to often, these days, on the net as well) which are generally scams, but not much more so. It's 'water cooler chat' page, however, is clearly a source of social contact for the isolated.

Another example is the Ivillage Work-at-home site (http://www.ivillage.com/work/). Firmly in the patronising women's magazine tradition, this places chatty advice for homeworkers in amongst determinedly cheery hints about childcare, weightloss and keeping fit. However it acknowledges many of the real problems facing homeworkers and engages them in interactive discussions about how to stay motivated, manage finances, juggle childcare with work and make ends meet. Reading the messages on the bulletin board, one feels both the desperation of many of these homeworkers and their refusal to lapse into self-pity, determined, self-deprecating humour and the beginnings of a sort of solidarity spreading between them.

Other, more subversive, web-sites I have noted, run by workers themselves, are beginning to engage in the sorts of dialogue which may well be precursors to more formal trade union organisation. One of my favourites is Temp 24-7 (http://www.temp24-7.com/LIVE/issue/current/home_frames.html) whose main purpose seems to be to enable temporary workers to share their frustrations with each other. Its regular features include ‘Temp tales of terror’ and ‘Gripe of the week’ and a interactive game called ‘Temps vs Suits’.

Working Today (http://www.workingtoday.org) describes itself as “a national nonprofit membership organization that promotes the interests of people who work independently - a diverse group that now makes up nearly 30% of the American laborforce. Our members are freelancers, independent contractors, temps, part-timers, contingent workers, and people working from home.” The organisation boasts 60,000 members and fifteen affiliated organisations and offers its members practical information about employment rights and wage rates, health insurance and legal services. One of its affiliated organisations is the World Wide Web Artists Consortium (http://wwwac.org) which alongside its internet-based special interest groups and email discussion lists has started to offer that most non-virtual of activities: the monthly meeting!

More on Teleworking

In the last newsletter I mentioned a few people whose work on teleworking I really respect and who are published in academic journals and are therefore respectably citeable in academic dissertations. One of these was Nicola Armstrong. Since I last wrote, I have discovered that she died, very tragically at the end of last year. What a loss. She was a vibrant, committed, intellectually restless, terribly clever young woman, with some brilliant books yet to be written, much discouraged, when I last spoke to her, that her study of teleworkers in New Zealand had been rejected by a British publisher because she had 'failed to prove its relevance to an international audience'. It is hard to imagine a British study being turned down by a New Zealand publisher on the same grounds. How imperialism lives on. Her 'Negotiating the Boundaries between "home" and "work"' appears as a chapter in 'Virtually Free', the book I edited with Ewa Gunnarsson, published by NUTEK in Stockholm in 1997.

I am delighted, however, to be able to refer you to an important article by Bill Michelson, from the University of Toronto, called 'Time Pressure and Human Agency in Home-based Employment', which was presented to the 1998 annual meeting of the ASA (American Sociological Association) in San Francisco. He has drawn on a rigorous analysis of time-use data from the Canadian Census (which, unusually, doesn't just ask people to keep detailed diaries of their daily activities but also asks them what they actually enjoy doing) to produce some genuinely new insights. If you have trouble tracking this down I will be happy to forward your email to him.

We are often asked for details of qualitative sociological studies of teleworking. Whilst some are undoubtedly being carried out (the enquiries we get from postgraduates doing dissertations on the subject are now running at around six a week) I still find that the studies which make me sit up and think are not carried out by people with this narrow focus. The most insightful study of the changing relationship between work and home life which I have read in recent years is Arly Hochschild's 'The Time Bind' published by Metropolitan Books, New York, 1997 in that great tradition of radical inductive American sociology that goes back to Wright Mills.

Call Centre Research

We're currently doing some research on call centres, together with Alan Denbigh from the Telecottage Association. The emphasis is on 'virtual call centres', the use of homeworkers as an overflow (or occasionally core) workforce for call centre work.

As part of this research we are carrying out two internet surveys. The first is a survey of call centre managers, to find out their attitudes to this kind of work

The second is a survey of people who might be interested in working from home, perhaps because they have a disability, are a carer or are living in a remote rural area from which it is difficult to commute to work to find out whether this is a sort of work which they might be interested in or capable of doing, and what their attitudes are.

If you happen to know anyone in either of these categories, please encourage them to complete the questionnaires (a donation will be made to charity for each one completed).

For call centre managers, the address is http://www.employment-studies.co.uk/surveys/vcc.html

And for potential teleworkers, it is: http://www.employment-studies.co.uk/surveys/telework.html

Academic Publishing

My comments on academic publishing in the last newsletter produced quite a flurry of responses. I did not wish to suggest that scholars should not publish their results to share with their colleagues. Quite the contrary. My concern was that present practices are leading to an erosion of quality:

* because the process of peer review tends to bring with it a tendency towards mediocrity and filters out the genuinely innovative and especially any original work which leaps outside traditional disciplinary demarcations

* because (at least in Britain) the invidious linking of funding to research rating and the use of quantitative measures based on publications in refereed journals to determine this research rating leads to over-publication

* because the practice of not paying authors drives a wedge between those scholars who are fortunate enough (or unadventurous enough, depending on your point of view) to have tenured full-time posts in universities and those who lead a precarious existence outside the ivory towers

And for other reasons too which I won't go into now.

To illustrate the last point: some time ago I submitted an article to an academic journal of art and technology called Leonardo. Somewhat out of my field these days, so they hadn't heard of me and sent the article to no less than four referees to be sure it was publishable, a process which took well over a year. By the time it came back to me (with a polite apology, an acceptance note and some helpful comments from the reviewers) I had almost forgotten what I had meant, it seemed so long ago, but I decided to go ahead and revise it, only to discover that not only was I not going to be paid (which I had anticipated) but I was also expected to pay permission fees for reproducing the pictures which, being an art journal, they wanted me to supply to publish with it. So it actually works out NEGATIVELY financially, like a sort of vanity publishing. The article, in case you are interested, is rather uncatchily entitled 'Nature, technology and art: towards the emergence of a new relationship?' and is mainly about robotic art. But goodness knows when it will actually be published. Acceptance just means that it is now sitting in a queue awaiting its turn. I never thought that I would end up submitting my own photographs for publication out of meanness!

Virtual Walks

The photographs on the Analytica web-site in the 'virtual walks' section (http://dialspace.dial.pipex.com/town/parade/hg54/break.htm) have attracted some delightful correspondence from all over the world, including a few people who have become really good friends. To these, apologies for the recent silence. I have been travelling too much and neglecting everything which isn't deadline-driven.

Note

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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