Turning now to the second theme, the location of the teleworker and how their home location with its own modes of ordering, is, according to the stories, potentially a cause of productivity tension to the office-located directors. Stories, particularly those in the earlier chapter on the cultural symbolic, tell of director-understood tensions between the home and the office as places of paid employment. These tensions, according to these stories, arose because the directors and their clients symbolised the home as the place of the family and not as a place of paid employment. The latter they symbolised in the form of the office where all the symbols of paid work resided. However, for the directors, the real tension lay between the perceived teleworker productivity in the home and the known productivity in the office.
Modes of ordering that privilege the office
From the symbolic dimension, a number of directors and managers considered the physical office to be a symbol to clients that the trustworthy and knowledgeable professional was located there: “Our
office is not very professional at the moment. We need to have a more professional space for client meetings.” Here, the manager at C was acknowledging that the symbolism projected by the firm’s client meeting space did not align with the client expectations of a space the professional trustworthy accountant would be located in. This symbolism of the professional was important in attracting potential clients who then based their decisions on which firm to contract with primarily on fee structure, their history with a firm or for specific financial and or management skills. Consequently, firms like WDN aligned their patterned networks to symbolise client network satisfaction:
One of the things here is our availability to our clients. If a client pops in, we like to see them; we like to be hands on … We want our clients to ring up and have access to our staff members.
To WDN,the physical office symbolised the location of the professionals to their clients. The directors, therefore, ordered the relationships within the accountancy network to satisfy clients’ demands that their client manager be available in the productive space of the office to take their telephone calls or to answer their queries when they visited the office. Thus, in this network the office continued to be reinforced as the privileged productive space (Watkins, 2005) to both the clients and staff. This traditional mode of ordering, symbolising the importance of the office as the place of work of the professional as the network truth, marginalises actors who work, or wanted to work, from the home network. Hence, the manager at T’s comment: “Why would they want to?”
From the political dimension, arranging the relationships of the materials to privilege the office and to maintain this ordering with little change over considerable time resulted in the actors within the networks of the firm understanding this mode of ordering as the truth, a truth which, according to Kundra (1992, p. 252), “promoted collective values, beliefs and identities,” or in other words, an organisational and professional culture. It was a truth that the actors replicated when they changed firms. It was a truth the actors tried to replicate when they became teleworkers or went home to work. It was, for this reason, that the Big Four required those studying for their professional examinations to always be present in the office and they reinforced this demand through the specific ordering of the relationships of, and between, the processes, agencies and technologies that constituted their training. Nevertheless, an actor, to continue to reflect this learned truth, must continue to be part of the mode of ordering of the firm with its office symbolisms, uninfluenced by other arrangements of relationships. Otherwise, actors may adopt changed patterns of ordering as their new organisational culture. This accounting culture generated by the network’s mode of ordering informed how the directors and managers constructed their meaning of telework. However, teleworkers were no longer integrated into that mode of ordering that reinforced the network truths. Thus, without the cultural
reinforcement from the office-privileged network, the directors were concerned that teleworkers would adopt the culture driven by the networks of the home, which posed a significant risk to the
least 1 day a week were more productively trusted. They regularly reconnected with that network of relationships which reminded them of their required cultural behaviours.
In ordering to privilege the office as the place of the productive, several firms like M involved elements of the symbolism of the home. The manager there told me, “We are a family here.” For Clegg (2005), this ordering of relations of the material to create a space that signified the social within the productive space assisted in privileging the networks of the office, for, the social space symbolised selected activities from the web of related activities that constituted the network of the home, such as celebrating birthdays, reflecting constants in the lives of the staff. These activities which reflected specific roles within the networks of the home were formed and related to other activities of the material that directed actors to attend the office for work. These activities were built into the ordering of relationships within the networks, like supporting the family and not letting the family down, that became accepted by the actors as the truth. Consequently, actors felt guilty not being at work in the office, guilty for not being actors in the materials of the networks of the firm. If this was how the network constructed accounting actors, then telework, as a consequence, was marginalised.
However, we should not lose sight of the reason the directors ordered the networks in this way. This traditional mode of ordering that reinforces the culture of the profession is political; it is what Law (1992) referred to as the mechanics of power, purposed to achieve the required calculations of
translation. An integral part of the mechanics was the ordering of actors and their agencies within the networks in the productive space termed the office. There made visible and present, actors carried out their roles and were reinforced in the organisational and professional cultures, that is, the mode of ordering of the firm.
Nevertheless, the networks of the firms were also influenced by the networks of the social, as actors go to a place of work leaving the home to the family and leisure. The office, therefore, is the space where actors are made visible, the space where they carry out their roles and reflect client perceptions of the profession. The office was a productive space that gave meaning to the actors located there and also one with a political dimension that influences and informs the modes of ordering of the networks.
Modes of ordering that privilege the home
Homes like offices were comprised of networks of relationships that through agencies directed activities to achieve translations. Also, like the office networks, these networks of the home were influenced by the structures of society and its symbolisms. Thus, teleworkers working from home or
other staff who went home irregularly to work became part of both the home and the office modes of ordering. Given that the home and office networks of ordered relationships of actors and their
agencies are discrete, since they are ordered to achieve different translations, those who work between them must feel some tensions between the two.
Such tensions were vocalised by directors and managers who told of regularly going home to write a report, or review sets of accounts, or create a client training blog in order to avoid the distractions and interruptions of the office, or to catch up on work during the weekend. However, if they spent a longer period of time working from home, they became uncomfortable, because all around them were the symbolisms of the networks of the home encouraging them to undertake the role identities the networks of the home expected of them. This conflict resulted in the directors and managers telling stories about feeling the need to do the chores, feed the chickens, read a book in the sun and assist children who did not understand why dad was not undertaking his usual home roles. What the managers and directors were missing were the symbols that privileged the office, symbols that helped locate them in their pattern of relations within the networks of the firm which, in turn, defined their roles and gave meaning to their encultured truth that required them to achieve the agreed calculations of translation. Thus, they now felt guilty about being organisationally underproductive. These feelings reinforced within them that the office was the correct location of work, a truth they then communicated to other staff in the office, thus reinforcing the existing office-privileging web of relationships within the firm.
The discomfort the managers and directors felt while trying to work from home was, therefore, related to two opposing networks, two opposing modes of ordering, that of the productive and that of the social. Each defined the roles and expectations the respective networks had for their actors. However, by going home to work, the managers and directors carried into their home their professional culture, their work ethic as defined by the mode of ordering of the office. Yet in the home they were surrounded by the dominant symbols that defined their expected roles in the home networks. The tensions between the two network expectations led to a perceived inability by actors to appropriately carry out either of these symbolised network roles resulting in feelings of discomfort and guilt.
The home, therefore, is socially ordered to emphasise the roles the people in the home play in achieving the home-related outcomes of rest, recreation and family. The predominant role, however, is that of the woman who is socially symbolised and relationally arranged in the networks to manage the home and the family. Thus, we associate the home with the feminine. This the directors
understood, because they voiced their expectations that teleworking women would prioritise their roles within the home network, especially those related to children, ahead of any paid work: “It has
only been when there are children at home. It has always been about children.” Here, the manager at WDN articulates how she, within the network of WDN, has constructed the meaning of telework. For her, teleworkers are women who give priority to their family-related roles within the home networks, while also remaining within the networks of the firm carrying out their assigned roles full- time, part-time or on-call within both networks. Certainly, all teleworkers were women, thus
confirming how women are structured within the networks of the social and, reflected in the networks of the home and the firm. However, because of the director-perceived tensions between the office and the home networks, telework raised red flags for the directors in terms of the potential for lost
productivity.
Yet, telework was accepted by the networks despite these tensions. It was accepted as a means to retain actor skills, although only after negotiations to alter the relationships within the networks so that the network truths of client importance and productivity were addressed. Two directors, however, went further by taking advantage of the newer digital technologies to renegotiate
relationships between the teleworkers and the technologies, aligning these with similar ordering of the client networks to achieve the required productivity of both.