| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 53

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Laura C. Johnson, The Co-Workplace: Teleworking in the Neighbourhood. (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 2003).

PAID WORK is becoming increasingly person- rather than place-based. "Officelessness" is a defining feature of our times. These are the leading premises of Laura C. Johnson's new book The Co-Workplace: Teleworking in the Neighbourhood (2003). By focusing on place of work and "new" work arrangements, The Co-Workplace makes a timely contribution to evolving understandings of the changing nature of work. There is growing attention to the spread of forms of paid work deviating from the post-war standard employment relationship, such as self-employment, part-time work, temporary work, and other dimensions of precarious employment in the Canadian labour market. Yet there is a dearth of social science scholarship on the types of work arrangements facilitated by technological change, the continuities and changes shaping so-called new work arrangements, and their gendered character.

In the Co-Workplace, Johnson brings together historical and contemporary assessments of the benefits and hazards of home-based work for women, building on her own previous scholarship on industrial homework and telework in the public sector, and an inquiry into alternative visions of work arrangements. The goal of the book is to explore possibilities for maximizing the benefits of working off-site and minimizing problems conventionally associated with home-based work by developing the concept of the co-workplace. The co-workplace is a neighbourhood-based facility combining private workspaces and shared facilities and services. (4) Johnson's futuristic vision involves a hybrid facility designed to enable the self-employed and waged workers to work independently yet break their isolation by connecting with their colleagues and clients through access to sophisticated telecommunications technologies and the creation of new social spaces of place-based interaction. Variations on this type of facility already exist in the telecommunications-equipped satellite centres operated by large and small firms, occupation- or industry-specific centres, such as shared workspaces run as cooperatives for writers, artists, and designers, and collective workspaces in co-housing developments. Johnson argues that the co-workplace offers an antidote to the challenges posed by a variety of types of home-based work, from telework to industrial homework. She contends further that this type of facility is well-suited to women home-based workers given its capacity to reduce the stresses associated with co-location or the attempt to engage in paid work and care-giving in the same physical space (i.e., the home). Johnson employs a multi-disciplinary and multi-method approach to advance her arguments and to develop the co-workplace concept. She relies primarily on secondary research into the history of home-based work, open-ended interviewing, focus group research, and a survey of potential planning initiatives. The most original chapters in the book explore workers' experiences of offsite work, their ideal work arrangements, and their evaluation of a set of six alternative scenarios. Chapter two provides a brief history of homework in the west. Drawing on the work of Eileen Boris, Johnson casts the evolution of homework as a story of women's waged work being pushed in and out of the home, demonstrating that the process of industrialization is not unidirectional but varies by geography and industry. At a conceptual level, the chapter establishes that the sexual division of labour and the idea of "home" as the domain of women are basic to the institution of home-based work. Establishing this foundation enables Johnson to highlight continuities characterizing patterns of home-based work of earlier generations and patterns of the current era, such as homeworkers' economic dependence and inferior wages and working conditions. It also allows her to reveal changes brought by new communications technologies. On the subject of change, Johnson differentiates her account by arguing that telework has produced a more diverse group of homeworkers and, consequently, the motivations for homework have changed. Among some professionals and some workers using information technologies in their daily activities (a group distinct from knowledge-workers), the pursuit of home-based or off-site work is driven less by employer demand and more by personal preferences, including "balancing family responsibilities with paid work," an aversion to long daily commutes, and the desire for local community.

Complementing the dual emphasis on continuity and change in Chapter 2, Chapter 3 examines the pros and cons of home-based work. This chapter evaluates two competing claims: Haddon's claim that social factors counter any flexibility offered by telework, versus Duxbury et al's contention that home-based work not only offers workers flexibility in scheduling, but is less stressful due to the limited work interruptions. Ultimately, Chapter three finds many problems with the home office due to the poor conditions of home-based work, teleworkers' experience of the "electronic leash," and the porous boundary between work and home. Yet Johnson is careful to emphasize the benefits of off-site work. Chapter four, in turn, explores these benefits, examining two forms of telecommunications- equipped offices (i.e., the single-employer satellite and the multi-employer telecentre) and the organization of three facilities (Canada's first suburban telecentre operated by BC Tel, a small telecentre established by a Canadian firm in a mid-sized urban centre, and a suburban telecentre in Washington DC developed by the US federal government). These case studies represent three distinct models. The BC Tel telecentre offers permanent workplace for workers from different divisions of a single company. The Washington-based telecentre represents a more transitory workplace since it was designed to offer workstations on an as-needed basis to home- or office-based workers. Finally, the telecentre in a mid-sized Canadian city offers a hybrid model, providing some permanent workstations and some workstations that may be booked as needed. Based on interviews with workers and managers, Chapter four ends by affirming the telecentre as a desirable facility since it "introduces a physical boundary between work and home ... that helps some teleworkers to keep work from overtaking their lives." (36)

Johnson advocates developing co-workplaces sensitive to the desire of many (particularly women) workers to work near home but not in it. While Chapter four issues the challenge of "reinventing the office," (48) Chapters five through seven explore the merits and shortcomings of shared workspaces to develop the concept of the co-workplace and to test six scenarios with workers. By examining various experiments with shared workspaces, Chapter five addresses the question: what do the resource centre for interior designers, the telecom satellite, and the office wing of a housing cooperative have in common? Chapter six shifts to test the co-workplace concept based on focus group research conducted in conjunction with Women Plan Toronto, a non-profit community organization. The main finding here is that occupational and class dynamics, as well as geography, affect home-based workers' views on the co-workplace concept; for example, more than any other category of workers, home-based garment workers are concerned with health and safety. Yet there is general agreement among workers on the merits of the co-workplace concept. The workers surveyed find the location of the co-workplace in the neighbourhood and the presence of shared facilities (i.e, daycares, meeting rooms, and collective kitchens) appealing. Not surprisingly, given the six scenarios in Chapter seven, including a large renovated house, an industrial loft, a high-rise residential apartment, a community centre, a heritage bank and retail space, the focus groups deemed the residential high-rise, followed by a converted heritage building in a location well-serviced by public transit, to be the most promising spaces for co-workplaces. The scenarios presented in Chapter seven are nevertheless fictitious. Hence, the Co-Workplace: Teleworking in the Neighbourhood ends with an assessment of obstacles to making the co-workplace concept viable. For Johnson, the advantages of the co-workplace include its potential to separate work and living spaces, create collective workspaces outside the single firm, encourage community economic development, reduce automobile use, and, above all, accommodate workers with family responsibilities. Yet zoning rules based on the separation of the private and public spheres, home and workplace, represent a profound barrier.

Johnson's optimistic vision and concern to humanize home-based work, raised throughout the book but especially in the concluding chapter, are laudable. My concern, however, is that despite the inclusion of a focus group of industrial garment workers, the model co-workplace facility is driven by the norm of the professional or semi-professional worker. The occupational heterogeneity envisioned in this futuristic facility is innovative. Indeed, the concept holds promise for professional workers seeking independence, autonomy, and geographic proximity to home. Yet professional workers are just one segment of people engaged in these "new" work arrangements. Others are occupied by workers in precarious employment, whose employers may use work arrangements as distancing tools or vehicles for abdicating responsibilities related to the provision of extended benefits, statutory benefits, and occupational health and safety, as well as for downloading the costs of the equipment and supplies onto workers.

The Co-Workplace: Teleworking in the Neighbourhood addresses important and timely questions related to shifting spaces and geographies of work – it is required reading for scholars studying the changing nature of work. However, for the co-workplace concept to truly reflect Johnson's desire for humanizing home-based work, a broader array of policy issues related to labour and social regulation require more focused attention. This call is particularly pressing given the two basic features of this institution that Johnson so skillfully raises at the outset of the book – the sex/gender division of labour and the idea of "the home" as the providence of women.


Leah Vosko York University

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