The Orchestration of Work and Home. Teleworkers and Materiality of Home.

Telecommuting still remains relatively new and marginal phenomenon in Poland but it widely promoted mainly as an attractive tool for professional life, especially for women. The separation of home and work in the course of industrialization had enormous implications for construction of both individual and group identities and materialities of homes. The construction of everyday work practices at home has serious consequences for the social, material and finally symbolic ideas about “home” and “work”.

By focusing on group of 36 freelancers, and professionals who work using ICT technologies we have captured new working conditions that make so called integration strategies much harder to employ: in case of ICT it is possible to be more independent and mobile, but technologies cause additional conflicts and cause not integration but segregation patterns. The problem of work „visibility” seems to be crucial in case of the telework (as paid work), just as it is in case of the unpaid home work.

Our research project (financed by the Polish National Science Center) was a strictly qualitative project, base on the 3 years ethnography. It combined the challenges of the classic workplace studies and the private sphere ethnography issues (privacy, household duties, etc.). We have analyzed the practices and everyday­ life choices made by men and women when dealing with career involvement, domestic duties and materialities of their homes (it includes time budgeting, self reports, autophotoethnography) in 36 households and over 50 in­depth interviews (both joint and individual). The results of the study (published as a book)fostered by the experience of work present at home and influence the development of an interesting & multi method perspectives joining the individuals, couples and materiality of the household and work.