Working from Home: the 1985 verdict

The downsides to WFH were evident 35 years ago

Ever since Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave (1980), we have been taught to think of ourselves as ‘prosumers’. Today’s consumer, Toffler maintains, is different. By turning his home into a Toffleresque ‘electronic cottage’, he can transform himself from defenceless consumer to powerful producer. So Toffler offers us ‘prosumer’, an exceptionable term but one that enjoys wide acceptance among futurologists. The Henley Centre for Forecasting, for example, believes in prosumers.

Since we are all prosumers now, it can readily be seen that homes will soon become more like offices. Today’s IT revolution, we are told, makes decentralised working methods feasible for large organisations; on the other hand, entrepreneurial individuals will be ‘information processors’ – and they will offer their skills from home. Given current technological developments in the telephone, the tv, the video machine and the personal computer, the home promises to be the locus classicus of dynamic British pet-food brand managers and dynamic British software inventors alike.

For home-as-office scenarists, Britain is likely to be in the vanguard of progress. After all, Britain is the world’s biggest enthusiast for video machines and personal computers. At the same time the decline of UK manufacturing and the greater weight of services in the UK economy have together made Britain more and more reliant on information. Finally Britain can lay claim to considerable expertise, if not in mainframe computers or microelectronics, then certainly in broadcasting media, software and telecommunications.

Maybe the ‘transputer’ chip made by Iann Barron’s INMOS will be no match for Yasuhiro Nakasone’s Very LargeScale Integration (VLSI) programme for the development of fifth generation computers. Maybe ICL’s expert systems will be no match for the Artificial Intelligence machines IBM comes up with as a result of Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defence Initiative. But if the world does have a country on the verge of turning domestic life into office life, it promises to be Britain rather than Japan or America.

Anyway the whole issue of the home as office is now being taken seriously by designers all over the world. In America, Niels Diffrient has designed a multi-adjustable armchair – padded, if you please, in green leather – for sitting in at home while toying with chair-mounted keyboard and monitor. In Milan, Perry King and Santiago Miranda have long conducted research into products which fit both work and home contexts, while Michele de Lucchi has complicated matters still further by insisting on executive suites that look like living rooms (Designers Journal, May 1984). From all points of view, it appears, the boundaries between clerking and dwelling seem more blurred by the month.

Everything turned inside out

But will everything really pan out this way? One question immediately qualifies the smug prospectus outlined above, and that is this: if the boundaries between clerking and dwelling are more blurred, just where else are they clear any more? For just as the home may be turning into an office, so is it becoming a place for DIY, banking and shopping. Equally, shops now blend into leisure arenas, and vice versa. In the longer term, a development such as cellular radio threatens to turn cars into offices. Summing up, we can say that man’s artificial world has become fluid enough to give interior design a special function. Interior design now facilitates the transition of every individual from consumer to other roles – regardless, almost, of his or her immediate surroundings.

So the home as office may be nothing very special. It could be merely a small part of a wider and more comprehensive shift in what the American historian Stephen Kern has termed The culture of time and space (Weidenfeld, 1984). As in Kern’s chosen period, the turn of the century, we may now be entering an epoch in which methods of temporal and spatial organisation change dramatically.

Man’s basic perception of interior environments may change. Already car stereos have made the automobile as much an aural experience as one of transport (‘the Porsche comes extra’, as Panasonic’s ads unerringly put it). In France, Trains Grande Vitesse Atlantique will shortly boast railway carriages turned into children’s playrooms, courtesy PA Design. Everywhere man seems to be re-positioning his internal world. The home is no exception to this general trend.

Why all the fuss?

The better-off, we all know, have long been able to afford a study. Two pieces of evidence, however, suggest that the current metamorphosis of home into office is likely to be a more profound phenomenon. First, consumers are more and more investing in equipment, confirming the image of home as production site. For instance: Nick Butler, of industrial design consultants BIB, reports that the air-conditioning units he has developed for the US company Trane are to be sold at hypermarkets, not installed by builders, ‘because in America domestic systems are becoming a customer decision, not a supplier decision’.

Second, management theoreticians are now deeply worried about the conventional office, and cite as a symptom of its malaise the rise of working-from-home. This much is clear from the March-April 1985 issue of the Harvard Business Review. Here, in an article titled ‘Your office is where you are’, psychologist Philip Stone and designer Robert Luchetti come up with a revisionist critique of open-plan offices which has won them a prize from Francois Mitterand’s Minister of Culture, the ubiquitous Jack Lang. Stone and Luchetti contend that privacy, participation, successful quality circles and the continual re-allocation of company resources will only be possible in offices once personal workstations are thrown out and a new regime of tight, personal, employee-rented defensible space and computer-monitored shared ‘activity settings’ is brought in. Then, to sharpen the thrust of their proposals, they compare their revival programme for the conventional office with Toffler’s ‘electronic cottage’, and ruefully conclude: ‘If the office environment is so bad that people might as well work at home, what could be a better signal for change?’.

Stone & Luchetti are anxious to defend company offices against home offices. They point out that company offices are superior to the extent that they provide adequately for face-to-face communication. Here we have a technocratic version of familiar argument: ‘there will always be offices because people need social contact with each other’. But as even Stone & Luchetti are forced to admit, the home has the advantage that computer supervision of employees will allow work to be monitored there ‘even more closely than in the traditional office’. Put more broadly, the management theorists are being forced to concede the case for the home as office.

The underlying logic

If the management theorists are interested in the home as office, this fact alone should alert us to the superficiality of the ‘social contact’ argument in favour of conventional offices. For to imagine that man today goes to work so as to meet his fellows face to face is just hokum anthropology. Man goes to work to earn a living and in general he prefers social contact outside the office rather than inside.

We can go further. In spite of what pop anthropologists might suggest, Employer Push rather than Lifestyle Pull is likely to be the dominant force turning homes into offices. People will do office work at home not so much because it saves them travel and blends better with their leisure time, but because their homes offer their employers a more efficient production site than do company premises.

We need not yet take seriously Stone & Luchetti’s vision of computers supervising home-based word processor operators. The benefits management can derive from putting work out to home are more prosaic than this. A seminal survey, ‘Employers’ use of homework, outwork and freelances’ by Catherine Hakim in the Department of Employment’s ill-read but fascinating monthly, Employment Gazette (April 1984) shows quite simply that ‘establishments using outworkers and/or freelances are doing better, on balance, than the establishments not using these types of labour’. The survey notes that the ‘flexibility’ provided by home-workers – the fact that they can be easily subjected to seasonal or other variations in demand – ‘can of itself be a significant factor in a firm’s expansion or in its ability to ride through the recession’. Among home-workers, wage costs are also likely to be lower, holiday pay and sick pay rarer, and trade union organisation weaker.

This is the reality of work at home today. Further research by John Atkinson and others at the Institute of Manpower Studies, University of Sussex, suggests that the trend toward home as office should be seen as part of an emerging dualistic labour market. The people who work at home will tend to be part-time workers, short-term workers, job-sharers, the unskilled, the subcontracted, the agency-employed. A specially high proportion will be women and/or black.

In 1981 there were 1.7 million homeworkers in England and Wales, three-quarters of whom were employed in the service sector. Since that time home employment as a proportion of total employment has grown, as has the number of people in Britain who are self-employed. These are people who pay their own rent, their own heating, lighting, electricity and 9-to-5 telephone bills. They are usually on piece rates, not hourly rates. This is not a scenario of progress. On the contrary, it is, like the growth of the phenomenon known as the ‘black’ economy, a striking indication of Britain’s inability to organise work on a civilised basis.

How much of the work that goes on in the home can strictly be termed ‘office’ rather than ‘factory’ is a moot point.