Beneficios potenciales del estudio

In her book Resilience, Anne Deveson (2003) writes that her mother used to say that she could make a home anywhere so long as she had a jam jar full of wild flowers. Deveson goes on to claim that:

This need for home lies deep within all of us. It’s hard to be resilient if there is no safe base from which to journey forth. But home doesn’t have to be brick walls and a picket fence. I comfort myself with this thought. Nomadic people carry their homes with them. Aid workers make themselves at home in some of the most remote or dangerous places in the world simply by pinning up photographs, bringing along pieces of cloth, musical instruments, toys, favourite drinking mugs – anything that will help ground and nurture them (Deveson, 2003,

p. 200).

This chapter, the last part of the section on features of the casual lecturer’s job, focuses on how the provision of space for the casual worker defines their lack of status. It also discusses the relevance and importance of having a dedicated personal space at work and examines how people colonise their work spaces and what this might mean for the casual. It also asks whether it is possible or even safe for a casual to find this sort of territorial security at work and can it happen anyway? Some of the issues arising from territoriality and from not having appropriate designated space at work are also addressed.

The Importance of Home Space

Most of us will relish a place or places where we are welcomed and known or even just feel secure. This may be the actual home or it might be the local café where we are part of a morning community or it may be a place at work, made familiar and homelike through constant use. People may have only one place where they feel at home or they may have many. After all many adult children with their own homes, still regard their parents’ house as still their own and feel affronted when changes are made or their parents sell up. We like to make our homes to varying degrees in all sorts of places which we visit on a regular basis and which we can mark as our territory.

Work Space

So we come to the work location: if we regard a ‘home’ as being some sort of connection between people and their environment; an organisation of space which involves place, process and experience, (Olivieri, 2002) then there are aspects of the desk space which demonstrate some home like tendencies. It is also possible to see an office as the ‘front region’ (Goffman, 1959), the place where performances take place. In terms of TAFE though, the office/staffroom can be both the front region and the back region at the same time though for different groups of people. Lecturing itself must be a front region activity as the lecturer is performing for a group of students. The retreat to the staffroom for contract and permanent lecturers is basically for back room activities. However for casual lecturers, this is also a performance space, a front region where they have to demonstrate that they are suitable for ongoing employment. Some casuals, as they become better known and

have some longevity, may be able to relax more and treat this space as back region.

Many employees like to make themselves a home like base at work whether it is just a place where they regularly leave their possessions and the seat that they regularly use or perhaps the plush office decorated to reflect the personality and status of its occupier. If they do not have a desk, it might be their seat in the canteen or some other regular site that is seen as their space. People tend to make their surroundings predictable and familiar. For example, people on a bus tour often take the same seats for every stage of the trip. This becomes their seat and others are expected to respect this, so to take someone’s seat without permission may be seen as an act of aggression.

In her thesis ‘Migration, Frequent Moving, and Committed Dwelling: An Exploration of the Relationship Between Home and Self Production in the context of Post Modernity’, Helen Olivieri (2002) presents a model of home which incorporates three concepts: that home is essentially both a geographic and social place, that it includes set of practices by which it is produced and finally it has a set of key experiences which people associate with that home. Using that model, it is possible to claim that the desk space at work for the permanent or contract lecturer is a form of home. It is certainly a geographic location, lecturers go to a particular office, to a particular desk and are seated next or nearby to the same colleagues. Lecturers colonise their desks, arranging their books and papers in certain ways and access available storage. While these ways are not set in stone and may be subject to reorganisation or

tidying up, nevertheless there is usually a certain pattern of occupation. And finally there are a set of key experiences that happen in this space. While they are not necessarily completely the same as those practised at home, they may involve eating, socialising, relaxing and setting boundaries.

It may seem contradictory to think of a workspace as a variant of home but when people have an office or a space that is allocated to them on an ongoing basis, they have ways of making that space their own. If all the ‘occupied’ desks in an office were examined, it would be highly unlikely that these spaces were homogeneous. The ‘occupiers’ would have their belongings arranged in certain ways and a whole variety of methods of defining their spaces and their boundaries. For example, where desks are set next to each other with no dividing space, occupiers of those desks may well feel quite upset if their neighbour’s possessions leach over onto their desk. People develop a form of ownership of their spaces and may resent intruders who encroach upon that space in some way. As well given the amount of time that people may spend at work, it seems quite reasonable to think of this space as a form of home. In fact for some people it may be that they feel more at home in their designated space at work than they do in their own homes particularly if they are sharing that home space with others or if that home space is not safe in some way.

Organisational aspects of the desk and its immediate environs are key features of the production of self by the occupier. Goffman (1959, p. 17) writes:

When an individual plays a part he (sic) implicitly requests his observers to take seriously the impression that is fostered before them. They are asked to believe that the character they actually see possesses the attributes he appears to possess, that the task he performs will have the consequences that are implicitly claimed for it, and that, in general, matters are what they appear to be.

The workplace thus is a setting for the impression/performance that the individual wishes to present to this world. So one woman of my acquaintance who wished the others in her office to know how busy and sought after she was, kept a supply of message slips which she strewed around her desk as if they were current.

The workspace or alternate home provides opportunities for proclivities to be expressed; the arrangement of papers and pens, the photographs of loved ones, the arrangements of cuttings, cartoons, timetables on dividers, the arrangement of drawers all are part of the production of space and through that the production of the self that is proclaimed to the public. It is not uncommon for these aspects to be controversial; sometimes they can be locations for power struggles. I heard one manager in a non TAFE organisation boasting about how he would check the desk drawers of his subordinates and if he did not consider them tidy enough, he would tip the contents onto the floor. While this is seen as extreme, and most people would regard going through someone’s desk drawers as being off limits, as an invasion of privacy, there are other examples of power relations over the organisation of work space. There is one exception to this in some offices; the top drawer of a desk

is frequently the one in which office tools such as staplers and scissors are kept. When the occupant is not there to give official permission, it is acceptable to look quickly in this top drawer for the tools you wish to borrow. This search though should be conducted quickly and on a surface level only. If these tools are not readily available, the search should be abandoned.

People who have occupancy/ownership of the work space may give permission for others to use it but there is an implied understanding that the desk will be left as the owner likes it. An article from The News & Observer claims that people who are sharing space need to mark their territory to protect it and that this is a basic human instinct (Fonte, 2003). Just as dogs or cats spray to mark their territory, humans will mark their own space through physical or psychic means. While not being quite the same sort of space as home, workspace becomes ‘secondary territory’, a place which while not really owned is occupied frequently (John Aiello cited in Fonte 2003). Any decision by management to alter that workspace without consultation can cause enormous angst just as if someone came into our own homes and made decisions about how we were to arrange our furniture without reference to us; it would be seen as an invasion and an affront.

We know there are conflicts about how the desk and workspace should be used, whether they should be strictly work oriented or whether it is appropriate to have photos and other thing that personalize the spaces. A dispute with Australia Post was based on an issue over personal photos which one employee was instructed to remove. She was entitled to have only three personal photos on her desk and she had four. When she refused to remove

the fourth photo, she was docked two pay increments, equivalent to a $3000 fine. In the very public dispute that followed, Australia Post argued that it had management prerogative on its side (Marr, 2002). A massive campaign persuaded Australia Post to rescind its decision. That the employee saw fit to fight the directive, demonstrates that it was an issue with powerful meanings.

One of the contradictions about home is that it is an icon of safety and security and yet at the same time it can be a very dangerous place. When we feel at home, we feel safe; our home is our castle and protects us against the world. Yet this is not necessarily so. The incidence of domestic violence and general safety hazards such as faulty appliances, dangerous chemicals, slips and trips mean that the safety and security of the home is violated. This violation is not necessarily by an intruder but from those who inhabit the home. There is a higher duty of care legislated in the workplace; under occupational safety and health legislation, management is required to provide a workplace where their employees are, as far as is practical, safe from the risk of injury or harm. But there are many issues both psychic and physical which are not always recognized as being harmful in the workplace.

Space and the Casual Lecturer

One of the problems with being a casual TAFE lecturer is that of staffroom accommodation. It is an issue because there seems to be no set standards of accommodation provided not only for casuals but in fact for any other lecturers. It is usual for lecturers to be provided with a desk and some shelves in an open plan staff office. Access to computers varies with some campuses providing computers on each desk and some providing a bank of computers

instead. One thing that is usual though is that casuals are not given their own individual desk. Conditions vary according to the space available but sometimes only one desk is allocated for use by casuals no matter how many casual lecturers are working out of that office. Also if more desks are needed to accommodate other lecturers, then the space available for casuals is reduced.

In one department, without any diminution in the number of casuals employed, the desks available were reduced from three to one though the organisation of space in that rather large room has not been changed for many years. It obviously seemed easier to allocate the desks used by casuals to other staff who needed accommodation than to consider if there were any better ways of distributing the space. The idea that this might cause some form of harm or concern to casuals was either not considered or disregarded. There was of course no discussion or consultation; it was presented as a fait accompli. Either way it demonstrates that casual lecturers are not given the same respect as other lecturers who at least would be told before it happened so that they could clear out their desks.

It is not unknown that when there is a change going on, for casuals’ possessions to be tipped into a box so that they have to sort out what belongs to whom later. In a particular case, one longstanding casual arrived back at work after a holiday break to find that the desk she shared had been allocated to someone else and that most of her possessions were mixed in a box and some of her text books which she had purchased herself, had been allocated to other people. In this case this was a disregard of space requirements and

also of ownership and an invasion of privacy. When she enquired as to why she had not been rung and informed of the changes so that she could pack up herself, the response was that the program manager did not have time to make the call; a case of being invisible, unrecognised and disregarded.

It does not matter if there are several casuals in the department at the one time; they just have to share the space available and storage space is rarely provided. One of the reasons for this is that space is usually at a premium and the offices of lecturing staff are never big enough to accommodate everyone in any degree of comfort or privacy.

This looking to improve the use of space for the lecturers’ benefit does not always happen: one facilities manager was heard to query why lecturers would need office space when they would be spending all their time in the lecture rooms. Yet TAFE lecturers spend 44% of their official work time (37.5 hours per week) in activities other than face to face delivery29. These activities involve student interviews, marking, staff meetings and liaison, lecture preparation, training plan preparation, research, preparation of teaching aids30 and the almost limitless paper work resulting from TAFE’s involvement in the Australian Quality Training Framework. Even face to face delivery time may be traded off for project work or coordination work so the actual hours spent in the class room may be fewer than thought. As well, lecturers may return to their desks during breaks in classes.

29

According to the Western Australian TAFE lecturers’ certified agreement 2005, lecturers work a 37.5 hour week of which 21 hours is spent in delivery, 12.5 hours are spent in activities related to delivery and 4 hours are to be spent on professional duties.

Lecturing is an accessory laden occupation. Lecturers have class notes and handouts, overheads, books, and marking as basic tools of the trade. Those who work in areas such as hospitality or the trade areas may have other tools as well. Lectures do not spring fully formed from the head but need to be developed and researched and changed constantly. It is not possible for casual lecturers or any lecturers to prepare a set of lectures once only and then use them for the rest of their teaching career; the constant changes and revisions in training packages make this impractical31. This is not to say that a volume of resources that may be recycled, is not built up, it is but given that no storage or only limited storage is made available at work, casuals need to keep their resources at home and to carry those that they do need with them. It is not uncommon to see casual lecturers make a couple of trips to the car to bring in the marking that they have done at home or to have a trolley to carry their goods. These trolleys are becoming increasingly popular, they are convenient but at the same time they add to the casual lecturer’s cost of work.

The Meaning of Space

While there are some very basic reasons for the shortages of accommodation based on a belief that those who are there all of the time, those who belong there, should have the allocated space, there are some deeper issues such as inclusion, recognition, visibility and territoriality that are worth examining. Office space is not just space without meaning, it is a form of personal space.

31

On average, training packages are updated every five years: this updating may be minor or it may mean a complete change in focus. The Community Services Training package CHC02 is about to be phased out and its replacement will require courses to be rewritten.

As Painter (1991) points out the use of personal space in the workplace is part of the ranking of groups and people through socially constructed means. Higher rank means that you are rewarded with larger and more luxurious offices and furniture. It may be that the organisation has rules on what sorts of furniture you are entitled to as a result of your status just as they have rules about the size of your company car and its accessories. In one small non-government organisation, the director got the new computer even though he used it little while his secretary worked with inadequate equipment. This goes far beyond what might be thought of as having any practical or functional purpose. What then are we to think of the status of those who are allocated no space or who are only allocated space as an afterthought? That the allocation of space is probably thoughtless rather than being deliberate