Stone, SH., 2015.

At Home In Work

At Home in Work

The home is now a place where the boundaries between private and public, work and leisure have been eroded. Where work used to take place in a separate and specific workplace more knowledge workers now take work home to be continued both in evenings, and, during any of the seven days of the week. This has, in part, arisen from the cost, duration, and stress of commuting combined with advances in technology and communication.

Over the last thirty years these radical changes in work/life patterns have forced massive adjustments to the manner in which the home is occupied. This movement of office work into the home has an impact upon the quality of domestic environment. Office-workers can complete work when they want to and they can work in the manner that they want. It could be argued that people are not adapting their lives to fit in with work, rather the opposite, they are adapting the work to fit in with their lives. There is the opportunity to complete work when and where they please. The office does not necessarily have to take over the home, because work and home can become intertwined. Each supporting the other, it is apparent that it is not difficult to juggle the demands of both.

The manner in which work is completed has radically changed, it has moved out of the office and into the public sphere. Old-fashioned notions of hierarchy and privacy have been smashed, and now work and home, public and private, are interwoven. This paper will explore the consequences of this radical migration.