Wired to the World, Chained to the Home: Telework in Daily Life

How does working at home change people's activity patterns, social networks, and their living and working spaces? Will telecommuting solve many of society's ills, or create new ghettos?

Penny Gurstein combines a background in planning, sociology of work, and feminist theory with qualitative and quantitative data from ten years of original research, including in-depth interviews and surveys, to understand the impact of home-based work on daily life patterns. She analyzes the experiences of employees, independent contractors, and self-employed entrepreneurs, and presents significant findings regarding the workload, mobility, differences according to work status and gender, and the tensions in trying to combine work and domestic activities in the same setting.