Working from Home: Emancipation or Alienation of the White-Collar Worker

Photograph: iStock

Introduction

The worker … is at home when he is not working, and not at home when he is working.

Marx, Early Writings, p. 326

Since the outbreak of COVID-19 in the early beginning of 2020 large chunks of the world’s white-collar population — at least in Western countries — have been working from home. Some still are. Not the nurses, the bus drivers, or people in retail, but office workers, teachers, engineers, lawyers, therapists and so on. To some, it has been a pleasant experience, to others working from home has been lonely and exhausting. Those who have enjoyed the new working conditions and the changed work environment report benefits like these: Commuting time has been reduced, the pressure on the family likewise and the conditions for deep work[1] have been dramatically improved as a result of both fewer interruptions from co-workers and less office noise.

Conversely, the more unenthusiastic group reports loneliness, work without boundaries, Zoom-fatigue, and frustration over work’s “colonialization of the home” in both a digital sense (your boss and colleagues are staring at your home arrangements, pets, partner, and children in digital meetings) and in a concrete physical sense; laptops, cables and office papers lying around on dining tables, in bedrooms and in children’s rooms.

Scope of the research object

The purpose of this article is to examine one distinct aspect of work, namely the practice of doing paid work for (mostly) an employer or (more rarely) a client in a domestic environment. I define working from home as a subsection of the broader category remote work (which can be done in other settings than the home). Despite the slightly different meanings of the two words, I will use them interchangeably in this article, and in doing so both terms will refer to working from home, unless otherwise explicitly stated. My main point of interest is paid work which specifically takes place in a domestic setting — not in airports, cafés, or office hotels — as I assume that boundary issues are more likely to occur in this particular environment.

Boundaries are understood in the way that professor of management Glen E. Kreiner defines them: “In general, boundaries delimit the perimeter and scope of a given domain (e.g., a role, a country, a home, a workplace)” (Kreiner, Hollensbe & Sheep 2009, p. 705). The boundary between the home and the workplace has a spatial-temporal quality as it is experienced as both a physical distance and as commuting time, but the boundary is also marked by different behavioral norms[2], not to mention the different kinds of work, that are being carried out in the two domains, one being oriented towards production, the other towards reproduction (Bhattacharya 2017). In settings like a library or a café, boundary issues are presumably not as prevalent, because places like these are only semi-reproductive and can easily be converted into productive domains without anyone paying attention: cafés and the like are neither dedicated exclusively to restitution and care, nor to production and performance. And even though cafés are not working zones per se, they are nonetheless public spaces with common standards and (social) performance requirements.

Unlike cafés and airports, a home is a private and informal domain, which is always accessible to its inhabitants and their close relations, but in principle never to anyone else (Rybczynski 1986). The home is not only governed by common societal norms, but also by local adjustments of these norms. Furthermore, the home is operating according to a predominantly “task-oriented” temporal logic, whereas the workplace organizes its operations around a temporal logic of “timed labor” (Thompson 1967). Consequently, the specific combination of home and work is an interesting case, because different spatial-temporal logics and different sets of normativity are brought to co-exist in one shared space.

For the same reason, I exclude blue-collar working from home from my object of research, because this kind of work typically involves some kind of spatial — and to some extent temporal — separation between dwellings and workplace. Mechanics, carpenters, and hairdressers use machinery, tools, and particular facilities to perform their jobs, and such working arrangements are rarely established inside the home, but are mostly located in separate, adjacent premises. I do not claim that boundary issues do not occur in what architect Frances Hollis refers to as “live-adjacent” and “live-nearby” arrangements (Hollis 2015), in which the home and the workplace are connected, but not conflated[3] — but I do believe that white-collar work done in a setting of no or very little spatial separation between dwellings and workplace represents the most extreme case of merging the two domains.

I am aware that I am examining a topic, which is almost exclusively relevant in a Western context, as the number of people in the Global South doing white-collar work from home is infinitesimal. Nevertheless, I find the topic important, because the practice of working from home has been — and still is — a topic of great debate and a practice that affects many people’s lives.[4]

Finally, I would like to stress that when I use the phrase working from home, I am never referring to unpaid, domestic work, whether household work (cleaning, cooking etc.) or care work (care for children, elderly or disabled family members, friends, neighbors, or other relatives).

Research Question

In the context of the changed work conditions brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, how did workers experience the practice of working from home? It is difficult to obtain a clear and unambiguous answer to this question just by reading the papers and postings and comments on social media. At the outset of the pandemic, positively charged statements about increased autonomy and flexibility were dominant.[5] Many experts were anticipating that the great shift to home-based work marked a new era, a “new normal”, and working from home was in general understood as a practice which would almost automatically result in a more sustainable work life.

But it did not take long, before more critical voices interfered with this ‘narrative of emancipation’ as I choose to call it. In an article[6], written by philosopher Fiona Jenkins, Jenkins points to the fact that the state — and right in the wake of the state: employers — were in fact expropriating people’s homes and imposing additional economical costs on households. Furthermore, the crowding in the homes throughout the day produced extra domestic work, which is highly gendered in favor of males (Craig 2020; Jenkins & Smith 2021). Jenkins’ observations were closely related to the specific lockdown situation, which means that the problems Jenkins brought attention to may not necessarily persist in a post-COVID world, but the article nevertheless raises some fundamental questions, in particular the question concerning the risk of the home becoming un-homely, when the order of production is added.

The term un-homely is closely related to the concept of alienation, which philosopher and political economist Karl Marx describes as the inevitable companion of the capitalist mode of production (Marx 1992). Marx identifies four modes of the alienation process: Alienation towards the product (the worker’s labor becomes manifest in the product, she produces, but the product does not belong to her), alienation towards the production process (the worker is compelled to engage in the process and to submit to the capitalist’s control in order to survive), alienation towards species-being (the worker acts against the interests of humanity, contributing to the overall loss of freedom, consumerism, the exploitation of natural resources etc.), and alienation towards other fellow workers (the worker competes with other workers for the same jobs) (Marx 1992, pp. 326–330).

Are the conditions of the worker any different in the 21st century than they were in the 19th century when Marx developed his theory? Basically not. People are still competing for jobs, producing unethical products, engaging in demeaning work processes, tolerating managers’ oppressive behaviors, performing meaningless tasks etc. Professor of feminist studies Kathi Weeks notes:

When more jobs require workers to supply not only manual effort but also emotional skills, affective capacities, and communicative competencies — that is, when more of the self is drawn into the labor processes and managed in accordance with the exigencies of profit maximation — the problem of alienation, from both self and others, arguably grows more acute (Weeks 2011, p. 89).

Alienation is a constant and in no way diminishing factor and I agree with Weeks when she argues that alienation has more favorable conditions in jobs that require emotional and creative skills, not to mention those improved conditions fostered by lately invented management mantras and practices such as ‘bring your whole self to work’ and ‘employee advocacy’[7]. Although the term alienation is not applied in the mainstream debates about work (see also the section Alienation is dissociated from work in the late 20th century), I assume that the narrative of emancipation articulates a fantasy about escaping or at least mitigating work-produced alienation.

The vocabulary, accompanying the narrative of emancipation, supports my argument: words like freedom, autonomy, balance etc. are frequently used when the benefits of working from home are compiled. As such, statements in favor of working from home seem to presuppose that remote work is a practice which has the potential to dismantle the close relationship between paid work and the experience of alienation. But a minority, which Jenkins belongs to, claims the opposite: working from home is basically producing new forms of alienation, which presumably is fueled by some sort of trespassing or boundary violation. Can both experiences be equally valid? And if so, what is it that produces these differences in perception? Summed up, my main research question is in which circumstances and to what degree is working from home emancipating or alienating?

Method

My method is mainly “archeological”. By that, I mean that I am searching for clues in a corpus of texts. I draw on a body of research literature about remote work to shed light on my topic, and to help me define my main concept, alienation, I also use phenomenological and existential philosophy. I am not going to define work or trace its historical evolution with equal thoroughness, as it is considered outside the scope of this article. It suffices to say that I understand work as the act of performing tasks in return for payment and the concept of working from home as “(..) ‘economic activity by members of households who produce within their place of residence commodities for exchange in the market’” (Wapshott & Mallett 2011, p. 64).

I also use a selection of recently published (2020/2021) studies of remote work during the COVID-pandemic. Some of the reported experiences in these studies are of course heavily affected by the extreme historical circumstances in which they emerged. Working from home during a lockdown in a climate of uncertainty and anxiety and with perhaps the whole family at home, is not the same experience as working from home in a society with no lockdowns (Jenkins & Smith 2021; Craig 2020). However, many of the emancipatory as well as alienating forces, observed in the studies, are also relevant in a non-lockdown situation. Therefore, these studies are included.

My methodological approach is to detect and extract the conditions and practices producing alienation, respectively emancipation, identified in the research literature about working from home, whether explicitly stated or not. What I mean by this is that the specific terms (alienation, emancipation) are not necessarily used by the scholars themselves, but I will be transparent about how I translate their findings into the terminology of alienation and emancipation. What I hope to find is some sort of ‘recipe’ for a non-alienating way of working from home.

Alienation

Alienation is dissociated from work in the late 20th century

The term ‘alienation’ derives from the Latin word for alien, alienus, which means “belonging to another”. The experience of not belonging to oneself is closely related to sentiments like loss, powerlessness, and submission. Alienation is an effect of a process in which the subject becomes an object, a property of the other, whether that other is a person, an institution, or a set of norms.

In general, the use of the word ‘alienation’ peaks during the period 1960 to 1980 according to Google’s Ngram Viewer. I have chosen the period ‘1919–2019’[8] (see illustration below) and the reference corpus ‘American-English (2019)’[9]. Some of the nouns most frequently associated with alienation (and of interest for this paper) are ‘self’, ‘worker’ and ‘work’. It is obvious, though, that ‘self’ and ‘alienation’ correlate more consistently throughout the chosen period than do ‘alienation’ and ‘worker’ or ‘alienation’ and ‘work’.

The Ngram graph may reflect the general shift, starting in the 1980s, towards a more individualistic orientation in Western societies, which some scholars refer to as ‘the neo-liberal turn’. The growing lexical use of alienation in combination with self (and the correspondingly declining use of alienation in combination with work(er)) suggest that alienation is increasingly understood as a phenomenon relating to identity and subjectivity and less to societal structures and dynamics. If this is true, one must assume, that alienation is progressively understood as a conflict within the individual, rather than a result of individual agents encountering external, oppressive forces. In reality, this is not a question of either/or, because alienation can — quite reasonably — be understood in both subjective and objective terms: As a state of ‘homelessness’ or meaninglessness, experienced by a worldly, human subject, and as an objective phenomenon operating on a structural level, but not necessarily experienced or recognized by any particular subject (except the researcher, scientist or philosopher). Marx himself operates with alienation in both senses (Leopold 2018), and as such both understandings are valid, only on different levels.

Another possible explanation of the rise of ‘the alienated self’ in the 1960s is the contemporary advancement of poststructuralist thinking, which, roughly speaking, claims that there is no such thing as a coherent, undivided self. The tight coupling between the terms ‘alienation’ and ‘self’ might therefore merely reflect the fact that postmodernist ideas about the split self gain momentum during this period. However, this would not explain the simultaneously steep decline in the lexical use of alienation in combination with work(er). From the data Google presents I can only conclude that ‘work’ and ‘alienation’ are dissociated during the 1980s and 1990s, they are no longer conceived as related phenomena, and the reason for this separation is unknown, although I assume that the separation, at least partly, reflects the broader ‘spiritual etymon’ of the period, in which the idea of the individual as a ‘free agent’, independent of societal structures, is spreading, as well as the idea of work as a personally and professionally rewarding practice (beyond remuneration).

The problem regarding human nature

The idea of alienation is present in many intellectual traditions, but what the term means and how it is applied to explain different socio-psychological phenomena vary from one tradition to another. Yet, according to professor of political theory David Leopold most of these traditions share a central idea which can be summarized like this:

This basic idea of alienation picks out a range of social and psychological ills involving a self and other. More precisely, it understands alienation as consisting in the problematic separation of a subject and object that properly belong together (Leopold 2018).

Thus, the process of alienation requires an agent or a subject (typically, an individual or a group of individuals), an entity or an object (an institution, a set of norms, another individual/group of individuals or even the subject itself), and a relation between the two that is broken in an uninvited and detrimental way. It is important to emphasize that subjects and objects can be separated in numerous ways that do not cause alienation. The alienation process can only be initiated if the subject and the object belong together in some sort of original or natural unity, which is disrupted by forces that are beyond the subject’s control.

In practice, however, it is hard to determine whether a relation between a (human) subject and a (human/nonhuman) object is a natural one or not. The difficult part in doing such an assessment concerns the term ‘natural’ (or “properly belong together” in the quote above), because it implies that those doing the assessment have some sort of idea about human nature in the first place. One can only isolate the variables that genuinely belong to the human subject if one has an idea of the nature of that subject. It is not an insurmountable task to form an idea about human nature, many have done it throughout history, but scientific, philosophical, or psychological consensus about any such idea is unachievable. There are no standards or measures that are able to determine whether one representation of human nature is more adequate than the other. If I argue that living in a nuclear family is in accordance with human nature, others may object by pointing to the fact that people in other historical periods or other parts of the world live in other family constellations that seem natural or proper to them. Or if I claim that human nature is characterized by a benevolent approach towards other beings, others may with just as much confidence and credibility propose the opposite. To identify and categorize human nature is rather complicated because conceptions of that nature fluctuate along historical lines, changing philosophical thought schemes and scientific innovations.[10] It is in fact impossible to determine, where culture ends, and nature starts — and vice versa.

As a starting point, I accept Leopold’s definition of alienation, I only wish to emphasize that certain problems inevitably follow if one analyzes alienation exclusively based on presumptions about human nature. When I started working on this article, I had a clear understanding of what working humans need and what they do not need. In other words, I was making (implicit) assumptions about human nature. On the other hand, when examining a concept like alienation, some assumptions about human nature seem unavoidable, because the alienation process only makes sense if it is understood as some kind of violent act against human nature, or to put it more precisely: against human existence (being).

Alienation as impeded appropriation

It is in fact possible to define alienation without giving an essentialist account of human nature if one allows a more process-oriented approach. Professor of philosophy Rahel Jaeggi offers an appealing theory, which is not dependent on ideas about ‘essentialist human nature’ or any ‘original unity’ between subject and object. Jaeggi defines an “unalienated life” like this:

(..) not being alienated would refer to a certain way of carrying out one’s own life and a certain way of appropriating oneself — that is, a way of establishing relations to oneself and to the relationships in which one lives (Jaeggi 2014, p. 33).

Conversely, living an alienated life “(..) can (..) be understood as an impairment of acts of appropriation (..)” (ibid., p. 36, original italics). The central term in Jaeggis’s theory is appropriation, which must not be confused with property or possession, because it alludes to the very act or process of appropriating something. It is the subject’s capacity of seizing itself and the world that constitutes the possibility of an unalienated subject. And in this process the subject is not reappropriating some lost essence or unity but appropriating something that forms and alters both the subject and the appropriated object: “In a process of appropriation both what is appropriated and the appropriator are transformed” (ibid., p. 38). In other words, the appropriation process brings both the subject and the other into a particular mode of being, but it is a process which has no endpoint, both the being of the subject and the being of the other are continuously constituted by the endless series of acts of appropriation.

If this ongoing process is obstructed, alienation takes up residence in the subject. Jaeggi understands alienation as a loss of freedom in not only the negative sense (freedom from coercion), but also in a positive sense; as “the capacity to realize valuable ends” (ibid., p. 35), to be one’s own master, to be self-directed. I will not elaborate further on the concept of freedom, because the format of this article does not allow it, but I find it interesting that alienation in this perspective can be understood not only as the negation of freedom in the negative sense (absence of dominance and violence), but also as the negation of freedom in the positive sense (presence of autonomy and self-mastery).

Appropriation of space

The two professors of entrepreneurship Robert Wapshott and Oliver Mallett offer an analysis of the spatial implications of working from home in which appropriation also plays a central part. Basically, the two authors claim that space is not “an empty container”, a passive stage waiting for the actors to arrive. On the contrary, space is rather “fluid”, “multi-layered” and “alive with meanings” (Wapshott & Mallett 2011). Space is not neutral but marked by the life that goes on in it. The spaces of the home are consequently defined by the ways people are living and acting in them, and the meaning of these spaces are inevitably destabilized when the order of work is introduced into the home. Not only because work literally takes up space, but also because the norms belonging to work stick to the homework arrangements:

This process can lead to a symbolic contestation in the representational (lived) space of the home. (..) As what was once a ‘domestic space’ becomes a ‘work space’, the values and rules of work are imported and accumulated (ibid., p. 69).

How will workers typically try to cope? If possible, they will set up a workstation in a separate room and thereby establish a rudimentary boundary between the workspace and the space of the family. But that will not necessarily isolate work from the other premises in any substantial way. Even when the workspace is separated from the living space, new rules are typically implemented and imposed on other members of the household, for instance ‘do not enter the study/home office’ (the space becomes off limits), ‘be silent when someone is in there’ (restrictions on behaviors in other premises than the home office itself), ‘do not play online games when someone is in a Zoom-meeting’ (limitations of leisure options) etc. None of these rules originate from the home’s inhabitants themselves, they are all constituted by the order of work. This fact, that norms and rules emerging from the world of work are intruding into the worker’s most private, most informal, life domain, is a source of alienation — and this is no less manifest, if the worker has no other choice but to set up a workstation on the dining table.

So, if a physical boundary is not enough, if “the home space can come to be ‘dominated’ by the needs and demands of the work” (ibid., p. 73) even when one isolates the workspace behind a closed door, what options do the home worker have to protect the domestic space from the dominance of work-related norms? Inspired by the Marxist philosopher Henrik Lefebvre the two authors suggest a strategy of appropriation: “The process of appropriation refers to the acts of resistance engaged in by an individual or group to appropriate the space(s) they inhabit” (ibid., p. 70). I find this anti-alienating strategy much in line with Jaeggi’s understanding of appropriation, mentioned in the previous section, in which the subject can only obtain freedom by appropriating herself as well as her surroundings over and over again. Wapshott and Mallett point to concrete micro-actions of appropriation such as: children crossing the threshold to the home office to use the space as a playing ground; or the home worker’s partner appropriating the home worker’s laptop to use it for personal ends. Acts like these are reclaiming control of the space and the artefacts it contains, which by the very act of appropriation are infused with new meaning, transformed in the Jaeggi sense.

On the basis of Jaeggi and Wapshott & Mallett I conclude that in order to prevent alienation in the process of working from home, the worker must continuously be able to appropriate the spaces and the work artefacts for other purposes than work. Furthermore, the worker must be able to pursue valuable ends to achieve freedom in the positive sense. This means that the worker must be granted extensive autonomy and that she is not required to perform pointless tasks.

Obviously, the (lack of) freedom to pursue valuable ends is not only a problem for home workers, but for workers in general. In his book Bullshit Jobs (2019) anthropologist David Graeber provides evidence that the experience of doing pointless tasks is common among both blue- and white-collar workers. I believe that the narrative of emancipation, the fantasy about escaping work-generated alienation, neglects the fact that some alienation-producing mechanisms do not disappear just by changing the location. Non-valuable work can just as well be done from home.

Surveillance: the institutionalized gaze of the other

Likewise, the practice of employer surveillance is in no way confined to the corporate workplace. Indeed, as surveillance is extended from the workplace into the worker’s personal dwellings (by virtue of digital surveillance tools) it has a potentially even more harmful effect than when it is carried out in the corporate workplace. The practice of surveilling or otherwise monitoring employees working from home does not only effectively prevent the worker’s ongoing appropriation of spaces and artefacts, but it is also a practice that produces alienation of its own kind.

Scholar of international relations Ivan Manokha puts it this way:

(..) surveillance transforms employees’ private space into a workplace that the employer has the right to intrude and which (..) also results in a new form of alienation — the alienation of workers from their homes (Manokha 2020, p. 285).

The act of surveilling someone is identical with the act of constantly exposing the subject to the gaze of the other. Not the gaze of some random other, but the other as “the normative horizon within which the Other sees and listens and knows” (Butler 2001, p. 22). The philosopher Jean Paul Sartre elaborates on the gaze of the other in his book Being and Nothingness. In a famous passage from the book, the subject (the “I”) is jealously peeking through a keyhole to watch its beloved in the company of another suitor. Unexpectedly, the subject is interrupted by the arrival of yet another person:

But all of a sudden I hear footsteps in the hall. Someone is looking at me! What does this mean? It means that I am suddenly affected in my being and that essential modifications appear in my structure (..) (Sartre 1969, p. 284).

The subject experiences the act of being objectified in the gaze of the other, of being categorized, assessed, and judged. This initiates a process in which the subject internalizes the gaze of the other, renounces its own freedom and submits to the standards of the other. This is also an element in a more general socialization process, I believe, which is probably beneficial in proportionate and reasonable doses, but damaging and alienating if taken too far. However, the situation in which the subject is observed and judged by the other is not only a situation in which the subject is displaced from its own center, it also affects the subject’s control of its environment:

But the alienation of myself, which is the fact of being looked-at, involves at once the alienation of the world which I organize (ibid., p. 287).

The subject realizes that it cannot operate as it pleases, the other’s plans — and instruments to bring these plans into practice — may interfere:

(..) the potentiality of the dark corner becomes a given possibility of hiding in the corner by the sole fact that the Other can pass beyond it toward his possibility of illuminating the corner with his flashlight (ibid., p. 287).

The employer holds this flashlight, not only in a situational way, but in a completely formalized and institutionalized way, when systematically monitoring employees’ keystrokes on the keyboard, their online activity etc.[11] In general, the employer has the authority, every day, hour, and minute, to determine whether each single worker is still accepted in the herd. This authority, however, is not only neutrally mediated through digital surveillance technologies. It is in fact augmented by such technologies, firstly because surveillance tools enable the employer’s omnipresence, secondly because they offer a granulated mode of monitoring that no human sensory system could ever achieve — capturing every micro-movement, every facial expression, every spoken or written word, and on the basis of all these data points the software is able to conduct real-time analyses of the workers’ mood and productivity levels. This does not only make the employer omnipresent, but in fact omnipotent, because the employer “sees and listens and knows”. The employer collects more information about the worker than he himself has access to, and this discrepancy between what the other knows about me and what I know about myself, this situation of the other knowing and thereby identifying[12] my “I”, is an act that actively produces alienation.

The economists Alison Pennington and Jim Stanford warn against the practice of constantly monitoring home workers: turning home work into “a new ‘digital panopticon’” is potentially so stressful and fear-provoking that workers will “be seen as incapable of operating in the new environment” (Pennington & Stanford 2020, p. 9). In other words: the problem with monitoring workers is in fact this practice itself, but the problem is rephrased as the workers’ inability to adapt to it. As mentioned earlier, surveillance also takes place in the workplace[13], but “[t]he threat to privacy and dignity posed by employer digital surveillance is obviously accentuated when that surveillance can potentially intrude into our homes” (ibid., p. 12). The gaze of the employer is not a loving or even indifferent gaze, on the contrary it represents a continuously existential threat to the employee, because it has the power to exclude. Furthermore, the institutionalized gaze of the employer does not only alienate the worker herself, but potentially also alienates the worker from her homely environment if this environment is encompassed by the gaze. When the employer is watching and/or listening in to the worker’s conversations, interactions and movements around the house, the gaze is obviously co-forming the life that is possible to live there.

On the basis of Sartre, Manokha, and Pennington & Stanford I conclude that in order to prevent alienation in the process of working from home, the worker must be exempted from the institutionalized gaze of the other, that is: all kinds of systematical surveillance practices.

To sum up: specific management practices produce alienation, and when these are transferred to the worker’s home environment, no less so. One could also put it this way: the alienation factor that was always embedded in most management practices becomes prominent when relocated to another environment. The disclosure happens as the practice of monitoring detaches itself from the office environment (in which it was perceived as a ‘condition’, something ‘given’), and claims access to this new — but also private — environment, the home. As the very act of surveilling moves from the background into the foreground — as an effect of the formation of a different, ‘competing’ background (the home) — the alienating component becomes manifest. Working from home is indeed an exposure machine.

Emancipation

The research literature agrees on two predominantly emancipating aspects of working from home which are more flexibility (Manokha 2020; Pennington & Stanford 2020; Jenkins & Smith 2021) and increased autonomy (Manokha 2020; Galanti, Guidetti, Mazzei, Zappalà & Toscano 2021). Flexibility can be understood as “greater control over one’s time” (Jenkins & Smith 2021), “the possibility to organise households and family tasks more easily” (Manokha 2020) and “greater flexibility in working hours” (Pennington & Stanford 2020). On autonomy Galanti et al. offer this definition: “(..) job autonomy (..) is the extent of independence and discretion permitted while performing professional tasks” (Galanti et al. 2021, p. 427). And further, job autonomy is understood as “autonomy in scheduling work activities and taking work related autonomous decisions” (ibid., p. 428). Consequently, I understand flexibility as a subcategory of autonomy.

I would like to point to yet another benefit of working from home which on the surface may seem only convenient and not emancipating as such, and that is the absence of commuting time. Suspension of commuting time is not only a question of saving x minutes or hours a day (convenience), but also a matter of temporal appropriation; it is a matter of reclaiming time from the employer’s right of disposal and instead devoting that time to the worker’s own ends (emancipation). Jenkins & Smith mention “important hidden costs of market-based work in offices or centralised work facilities (Jenkins & Smith 2021, p. 28), where the authors are referring to fuel, parking costs, train tickets etc. imposed on those working within these facilities, but I think that the ‘concealed time aspect’ is just as important. Commuting time counts as leisure time in official statistics, but I do not see why, because it is a sine qua non for having a job: the time spent on commuting is in reality time which is dedicated to and dictated by the employer. When working from home, the worker gains more of her own, personal time while reducing the amount of time the employer controls. Of course, this benefit is not possible to achieve if the saved commuting time is just converted into more working time. The surplus time must be appropriated by the worker to have any positive effect on the experience of autonomy and self-mastery.

On the basis of a broad range of research findings I conclude that in order to enhance emancipation in the process of working from home, the employer must refrain from claiming that commuting time is turned into working time and/or that workers submit to the same rigid work schedules as usual and/or that workers are always available to the employer’s whims. It all boils down to renouncing ownership of the worker’s time.

The narrative of emancipation may be a phantasm. For the relocation of work to the home does not in any substantial way challenge the initial definition offered by Marx concerning the worker’s alienation towards the product, the process, humanity, and her peers. I do detect an opportunity for reducing alienation towards the product by allowing the worker to pursue valuable ends and an opportunity for reducing alienation towards the process by granting the worker autonomy. However, working from home is not in itself any solution to alienation towards neither the product and the process, nor towards humanity and peers. The potential of the practice of working from home is rather its ability to shed light on specific alienation-producing mechanisms, embedded in the existing model of management which are otherwise flying under the radar. Its potential lies in the conflicts it reveals.

Boundaries revisited

Such conflicts are often evolving around boundaries, boundaries between work and home or between work and life. Recently, professor of philosophy Joanne B. Ciulla was interviewed by a journalist for an article in the Danish newspaper Information about modern work life and boundaries.[14] Ciulla states in the article:

Our whole life is (..) organized around the structure of the working day. This adaptation has been crucial for employers, also historically (..). With the industrial revolution, it suddenly became necessary to have everyone work a limited amount of time, away from their homes. [..].

Today, that “break with the rest of life” has become the very meaning of going to work (..) Once, work was always done at home, whether you were a farmer or a weaver. But today it has become part of our identity and of great social importance to be able to go to work (my translation).

Later in the article Ciulla’s reflections on working from home are paraphrased like this:

She [Ciulla] herself is critical of the many home offices that have sprung up in the wake of the pandemic. They contribute to the boundlessness that has really taken hold of our working lives over the past 20 years (..) (my translation).

To me, these quotes are interesting, because there was a time, before industrialization, when work and home were deeply intertwined, and where work apparently had no particular status in people’s minds.[15] Later, work was separated from the home and by that very token the status of (external/distinct) work increased, while the status of the work still being done in the home correspondingly decreased (Fraser 2017, p. 23; Mohandesi & Teitelman 2017, p. 43). A hierarchy was established and built on the grounds of the invention of the workplace and its dissociation from the home. Today, we are struggling to keep that separation intact. I find it paradoxical that we are eager to maintain a hierarchy in which the parasitic part is considered superior to the nurturing part of the relation. And it is paradoxical that we are prepared to defend a boundary that essentially was established by the capitalist order itself: “(..) capitalist societies separate social reproduction from economic production, associating the first with women and obscuring its importance and value” (Fraser 2017, p. 24).

Boundaries between different life domains and the possibility of their dissolvement or risk of their blending are central to the discussion of working from home. It is the boundary that continually produces the difference — and conflict — between work and life (including reproductive work), workplace and home (including domestic duties), but the question is whether this boundary, which basically is a social construct (Kreiner et. al. 2009; Ciierad 2012, p. 68; Rybczynski 1986, p. 66), is not only protecting the worker from the employer’s abuse, but also protecting the order of work from claims, made by workers or by people related to these workers? In the study I have already mentioned by Kreiner et al., some of the interviewed priests report obvious discrepancies between the ‘firmness’ of the boundaries surrounding the employee and those surrounding the employer. Employers generally expect a ‘thin’ boundary between employees’ private life and work life, but when employees expect a similar thin boundary between the two domains by bringing their reproductive duties into the workplace, the boundary suddenly thickens: “Priest 21-F told us that her church vestry had recently informed her that her “two-year-old was not welcome in church, that she was disruptive”” (Kreiner et al. 2009, p. 712). Obviously, the missing reciprocity in the relation between employer and employee and the lack of equal negotiating rights pose a very concrete problem to the employee, but I would also argue that the boundaries themselves are part of the problem.

To be clear, I believe the boundary between work and life is necessary under the given circumstances, but I am not convinced it is necessary if these circumstances were altered. The boundary is itself producing the very possibility of crossing it, especially by the most powerful party, and therefore it is not only there for protective reasons. I do not have any relevant alternatives at hand, but I would like to pose a question: what would it take to get rid of that boundary? To escape it in the first place — and thereby avoiding the risk of someone crossing it? Above all, it would require a departure from the sacred status of work, it would require a changed perspective, in which it is not the two-year old child who is seen as disruptive, but actually: work itself.

Conclusion

Sociologist Hartmut Rosa and his co-authors address in the article Appropriation, Activation and Acceleration: The Escalatory Logics of Capitalist Modernity and the Crises of Dynamic Stabilization the harmful effects of capitalist production for the planet, but also for people:

Even now, estimates suggest that more than 20 million people suffer from depression and burnout in Europe alone, with numbers rising, while even those who are not (yet) depressed increasingly turn to psycho-pharmaceutical means of human enhancement (..). In other words: the psychological as well as the ecological price to be paid (..) appears to be approaching a crucial tipping-point rather soon (Rosa, Dörre & Lessenich 2017, p. 63).

To prevent the levels of stress and burnout (which in themselves, I am convinced, are symptoms of alienation) from rising further, Rosa and his co-authors recommend seeking inspiration from premodern societies (ibid., p. 64), that is: Rosa encourages modern Western societies to learn from societies with less firm boundaries between work and life.

I basically agree with Rosa and his co-authors. Not that I believe that we could or should return to a more primitive way of living, but inspiration in terms of a lifestyle containing less work, increased integration of life domains, and an altogether reversed hierarchy between work and life. The practice of working from home do have the potential — is perhaps even the very premise — of approximating such a state.

But, as I hope I have already made clear, working from home is not the solution to neither alienation, nor stress and burnout, if the old regime follows along: if existing management practices are uncritically transferred to the home office, none of the potentially positive effects will occur. Conversely, if the home worker is free to appropriate her space and time, the emancipatory effects will be genuine.

The scope of this article has been the white-collar worker, but what about the rest of the working population? Basically, I believe that they too will benefit from at least some of the alienation-reducing end emancipation-enhancing mechanisms, already mentioned: the freedom from performing pointless tasks, the freedom from surveillance and the freedom to be and act as an autonomous person. One can only hope that working from home will be a catalyst for a less alienating work life for everyone, but the success of such a change will depend on a radical break with a number of institutionalized management practices.

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Notes

[1] ‘Deep work’ is a concept, coined by the American computer science professor Cal Newport, in his homonymous book. Deep work is essentially the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task.

[2] The clashes of norms of the two domains were exposed in the videos that went viral during lockdowns, showing people in digital meetings who were formally dressed on the upper body, and wearing pajamas pants longer down; people who forgot to turn off their camera and mute the sound, when they went to the bathroom; and people, doing interviews or speeches, that were interrupted by toddlers who did not recognize the formal work identity of the parent.

[3] In a study carried out by Kreiner et al., one of the findings was that priests, living in a rectory adjacent to the church, experience a wide variety of boundary issues (Kreiner et al. 2009).

[4] According to Denmark’s Statistics, the central authority on Danish statistics, 40 percent of all employed people worked from home in the second quarter of 2020: https://www.dst.dk/da/Statistik/bagtal/2020/2020-09-22-40-pct-arbejde-hjemme-under-nedlukningen, assessed November 13, 2021.

[5] See for instance this article from The New York Times, published in May 2020, about the benefits working from home (although, the article also makes some reservations) https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/business/pandemic-work-from-home-coronavirus.html, assessed November 13, 2021.

[6] https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/6701054/did-our-employers-just-requisition-our-homes/, assessed December 2, 2021.

[7] Employees are — formally or informally — expected to promote their employer on social media to attract both future employees and customers. It has been a topic in the Danish debate whether it should be a condition of employment, stated in the contract or the employee handbook, that the employee is obliged to endorse the employer during the period of employment.

[8] Before the beginning of the 20th century there are almost no mentions of “alienation” in combination with “worker” or “work”.

[9] Other reference corpora show the same tendency.

[10] In the Danish anthology “Kampen om mennesket” [”The battle over human nature” (my translation)] the authors trace and identify at least eight basic ideas about human nature: homo economicus (humans as fundamentally rational and self-serving), homo socius (humans as products of society), homo nationalis (humans as shaped by the national state, language and traditions), homo faber (humans as tool-using and working creatures), homo sapiens (humans as biological entities, governed by evolutionary laws), homo emotionalis (humans as first and foremost affective beings), homo humanitatis (humans as universal right-holders) and homo deus (humans as the only species, able to cross the threshold to divinity/eternal life).

[11] Prodoscore (https://www.prodoscore.com/) is a company that offers surveillance software that enables managers to monitor the pace of employees’ keystrokes, incoming and going emails, live screens, and webpage visits. It also offers to “track all comments and posts in social networks made by your employees” and to watch the faces of employees through the cameras on their computers.

[12] The etymological root of ‘know’ is the old English word ‘cnãwan’, which means ‘recognize, identify’.

[13] Pennington & Stanford refers to a study in which 70 percent of the working population in Australia report that they are digitally surveilled in the workplace (ibid., 12).

[14] https://www.information.dk/indland/2021/10/allerede-20-aar-siden-advarede-amerikansk-professor-arbejdet-fylder-vores-liv, accessed October 20, 2021.

[15] In pre-industrialized, Western societies before the 17th century, most people were working in their homes, or to put it more precisely: they were working in or nearby their houses — as the notion of home did not exist at that time (Rybczynski 1986). In even earlier premodern societies, the activity that we today are referring to as work was an activity that probably did not even has its own name, since it was an integral part of everyday life. It was an activity that did not involve any particular ‘site of production’ and an activity that was reduced to a minimum, as one produced only what was needed in order to survive (Clastres 1977).