In this story of the cultural symbolic, the differing symbolism within the networks of the firm and the home were unpacked to understand how their symbolism influenced the directors’ understanding of the meanings of telework as constructed by these networks. This story, therefore, has really been about influence. It has been about how the symbolisms of the clients, of accountants, of teleworkers, and especially of space, have all influenced, through the patterning of relationships within networks, the understanding the actors have of telework. Influences that helped shape how the directors made sense of telework and their consequent negotiations to order teleworkers within their networks.
Of interest, because of its absence, is the lack of stories about directors being influenced by the meaning construction of telework by other directors. Though directors did tell of meetings with their peers, they never told of discussions about telework with these peers. Therefore, what did space, the profession and telework symbolise to the directors and managers, and how did the resulting meaning construction influence their understanding of telework?
To the directors located in the networks of the firm space is symbolised as a productive place where client immutable mobiles are translated into financial reports. It is a place of productivity where chargeable actors are located, a place of identity where actors are symbolised as accounting professionals and a place of work where the actors, that constitute the firm, come to carry out their paid employment. In other words, this space was itself an actor in the patterned networks of the firm, networks the directors and managers understood and were comfortable in.
Space to the clients of the firms symbolised a place where professional persons who ordered their financial affairs using double entry accounting processes as required by the networks of various authorities in the social were located. Consequently, to retain these client networks, because they represented important on-going cash flows, the networks of the firms were patterned to reflect this client-symbolised space, a patterning of relations that privileged the office and marginalised the teleworker.
Teleworkers were located, full or part-time or on-call, depending on their employment agreement, in the home space. This space was symbolised as a social space, as a family and leisure space, not as a productive space. Consequently, when directors took work home to complete in the evenings and weekends, some felt uncomfortable for two reasons. First, in their homes the directors were surrounded by the symbolisms of the home space which encouraged them to assume their home
identity and responsibilities. These symbolism driven activities however, conflicted with the
director’s belief that in taking work home they would feel the same encouragement to work as they
did in the firm’s office. However, they did not, because the richness of the home symbolisms that surrounded them resulted in the discomfort the directors told of. Secondly, to the directors this tension between the spaces put at risk their symbolism of the accountant as chargeable. Potentially, their productivity could be compromised by the influences of the symbolic artefacts of the home, a concern that would have a direct impact on how the networks’ constructed their meaning of telework, because, if teleworker actors were symbolised as being less productive than the actor accountants in the productive space of the office, then the viability of that form of employment would be questioned. Alternatively, to maintain the economic, the pattern of ordering of relations within the accounting network would be renegotiated, as explained in the chapter on the Stories of the Economic, to ensure the maintenance of the productive. Thus, the productive tensions, the result of the discreteness of the two rich networks, the firm and the home, influenced how the directors, from within the networks, made telework meaningful and, therefore, where teleworkers were enrolled within the networks of the firm.
How, therefore, were teleworkers symbolised? The told stories suggested that teleworkers were symbolised first by gender and then as accountants. Although not directly commented on, it is probable that the networks of the social influenced how the directors symbolised teleworkers, especially in relation to the constructed roles of women and men, since all teleworkers in the firms that took part in this research were women. All, bar one, were teleworking because they had young children, thus they were fulfilling Whiting’s (2008) gender contract. There were no men teleworkers and the stories the directors and managers told suggested that in most cases male requests to telework would be negatively received, possibly because the social constructs men as the providers of the family who go to a place of work separate from the home. Secondly, teleworkers were symbolised either as teleworking accountants or as professional accountants who were well trained, some professionally others in-firm, and all with a history of delivering client accounts on time and
achieving charge out budgets. Consequently, they were symbolised as trusted professionals located in their homes. They were understood as actors who could separate their role identities and carry out their activities as required of them as actors in the patterned networks of the home and the firm. Where doubt existed about a telework’s capacity to do so, as a director at KT evidenced, this symbolism fell away and requests to telework were denied. “Ka asked to work from home after her maternity leave ended but, no, her work habits suggested she would be better in the office.”
Alternatively, if teleworking was allowed then specific economic conditions were imposed, as the Stories of the Political and the Economic chapters will explain.
The stories the directors and managers told of their symbolisms of space, accountants, and
teleworkers, all actors in both of the networks of the home and the firm, are important, as they tell of how the networks understand, are influenced by and enact within their relationships the cultural symbolisms of the social. Consequently, how the relationships within the networks of the firms and the home are ordered to achieve translation are the direct result of the network’s meaning construction of the symbolisms of the clients, accountants, teleworkers, the productive space and the home space, a meaning construction that the directors and managers told of in their stories of the firm and telework.
However, the firms did not construct the relationships between actors to achieve outcomes only from their sensemaking of the cultural symbolic embedded in the networks of the social, the firm and the home. These network relationships were also influenced by the political, since how agency, the power to act, is located through the web of relationships determines the roles actors play in achieving the required translation. It is to these stories that we now turn.