I recently read an article on the Shaker religious communities. They never attracted a large following (celibacy was one of the membership requirements) and appear to be nearing extinction. However they are well known for the exquisite craftsmanship and design of the furniture and other articles that they created, which lately have been selling for astronomical prices at auctions.
The Shakers had a communal life style. There are significant economies of scale associated with communal living: it does not take twice as much time to prepare food for two people as for one, for four as for two, etc. The same economies of scale apply to child-care (cf. kibbutzim in Israel). Looking at my own neighborhood, almost every home has a power lawnmower, even though most of the yards are quite small and one mower for every three houses would probably be very adequate. In the Shakers' case these economies of scale freed time, which could then be devoted to the creation of the artifacts for which they are best known.
However, communal living has only been practiced on a voluntary basis (i.e., excluding institutional populations or situations of extreme poverty), by groups with very strong religious or social ideologies: the Shakers, monastic orders, antisocial religious cults such the Koresh group in Waco, hippie communes, kibbutzim, etc. It appears that there are other social or psychological factors that overcome the economic advantages of communal living in the absence of a strong ideology.
I think there are some parallels here with telecommuting. The advantages have been obvious for many years: reduced commuting time and lower costs for the employee, increased productivity for the organization, less traffic and pollution for society, etc. However in spite of these advantages, up to this point telecommuting may not be much more prevalent than communal living arrangements.
So what's the point? Maybe what telecommuting needs is an ideology, or set of complementary ideologies, which would be sufficient to overcome the obstacles that have thwarted its adoption.
Yesterday at the 3Com telecommuting conference, I heard two possible rationales that might have (as is, or with political stimulation) enough emotional appeal to approach the power of an ideology:
Anybody have any ideas regarding
potential ideologies (preferably not including celibacy), or other rationales
with strong emotional appeal, which could be used as drivers?
On the other hand, the original memo was a precursor of some ideas I developed in my dissertation. I concluded that telecommuting usage is low, not because of low demand, but because of largely intangible and implicit barriers to realization of this demand. I developed analyses--based on agency theory and institutional theory--that identify and map aspects of these barriers to demand (Westfall, 1996).
Christensen, K. Women
and Home-based Work: The Unspoken Contract, Henry Holt and Company, New
York, NY, 1988.
Olson, M. H. "Telework:
Practical Experience and Future Prospects," in Technology and the Transformation
of White-Collar Work, R. E. Kraut (ed.), Laurence Erlbaum Associates Publishers,
Hillsdale, NJ, 1987, pp. 135-152.
Westfall, R. D. Remote
Work: A Conceptual Perspective on the Demand for Telecommuting, unpublished
Ph.D. dissertation, Claremont Graduate School, Claremont, CA, 1996.