The times and temporalities of home‐based telework

Abstract

Drawing on an empirical investigation situated in 25 households of professional managers, who worked regularly at home, this article explores how internalised time discipline is evoked, appropriated and challenged through and in home‐based telework. The notion of clock‐time is opposed with the notion of task‐time and it is shown how both temporalities inform the organisation of paid and unpaid work. It is shown that in some households the simultaneous co‐presence of conceptually different temporalities led to an increasing bureaucratisation of time as boundaries between “work” and “the household” had to be maintained and protected. In other households such co‐presence resulted in the emergence of more task‐based approaches to the co‐ordination of all activity and more elastic temporal boundaries drawn around them.