Power, Identity and New Technology Homework: Implications for `New Forms' of Organizing

Abstract

This paper reports on research which tracked the experience of a group of professional workers as they moved from being conventional office workers to becoming homeworkers where they used the new information and communication technologies (ICT's), but remained as full-time salaried employees. The paper evaluates the value of Giddens's conceptualization of power, identity and time/space in explaining the consequences of this move and compares his approach to post modem theorizations, which draw on the work of Foucault and Lash and Urry. The paper concludes with the view that such a form of organization is neither inherently corrosive of character (Sennett 1998) nor does it provide a space for aesthetic reflexivity (Lash and Urry 1994). What has yet to develop is a sense of `the other' within the emerging discourse serving to articulate this new form of organizing.