Telecommuting as viewed through cultural lenses: Discourses of utopia, identity, and mystery

Karin Annika Hylmo, Purdue University

Abstract

This study of telecommuting draws on the tripartite framework developed by Martin (1992) to reveal an organizational culture that was connected through utopian myths (integration lens), divided by time, space, work arrangement, and promotability (differentiation lens), and fraught with mystery, paradox, and ambiguity (fragmentation lens). While this investigation began as research on telecommuting, it was as much a study of cultural change, reorganization, dislocations, and attachments as it was about telecommuting processes and practices. Depending on whose voice is primary in narratives and research reports, telecommuting can be constructed as an innovative work arrangement, a potentially divisive practice, or a process that fragments the already fragile sense of attachment that many workers experience in today's rapidly changing and unstable organizational environment. The privileging of the managerial voice in the integration perspective created a work environment full of vitality, innovation, concern for clients and employees, and future-oriented. The differentiation lens acted as a reminder that different rationales for work arrangement choices are enacted daily and which should be taken into consideration if organizations want to commit greater percentages of their workforce to alternative work arrangements. The fragmentation analysis revealed a complex set of power dynamics that were nested and intersected to create contradictions, ambiguities, and paradoxes. In particular, this lens explored the ways in which paradoxes constrained and enabled organizational members to exert their own interests and voices and to question some of the practices of the organization. The most poignant image left by the fragmentation perspective is the importance of emotions in organizational life as members experienced grief when losing their sense of identity as rooted as a result of the reorganization, and as a result of telecommuting. But the employees also described feelings of joy and happiness at belonging to an organization that they were proud of and that allowed them to choose a work environment that would be optimal to them on an individual basis. And perhaps that is the most important lesson of all that the employees at FEDSIM can teach us.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Buzzanell, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Communication|Management|Cultural anthropology

COinS