FOUNDATIONS FOR HOME-BASED WORK: A COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE
29-30 November 2023
Conference Day 1 Speakers with the Foundations for Home-Based Work organisisng team
Foundations for Home-Based Work: A Comparative Perspective was a hybrid conference conducted at the National University of Singapore on 29-30 November 2023. With four academic panel sessions from 16 presenters. four keynote speeches, a session on home-based work in Singapore, and a practice/stakeholders’ roundtable, the conference saw over 100 local and international registrants in-person and online, including about 10% of attendees from government sector and 5% from private companies. An exhibition entitled Cases | Propositions by the MOE-SSRTG-funded project Foundations for Home-Based Work: A Singapore Study was concurrently launched and ran from 29 Nov to 20 Dec 2023, demonstrating diagnostic drawings of 9 research interviewees’ homes (from WP5&6 home audits), 4 propositional design models based in a typical 4-room HDB flat, and student work from Dr Lilian Chee’s studio course on Domestic Capital.
The conference entered a deep dive into case studies and research across the world, centring on home-based work in its manifestations related to the domestic sphere, precarity, spaces and times, and the digital world. Stakeholders both within and outside of academia were engaged, including members from government, non-profit, and private sectors. From case studies from India to Australia to the UK to the Philippines, presenters included international academics across disciplines from London Metropolitan University, University of Wollongong, Leeds University, University of Colombo, along with organisational speakers from the International Labour Organisation and WIEGO, and practicing architects.
Selected papers presented from this conference will be published in a Special Issue on Domestic Capital: Paid Labour and Social Reproduction in the Home in Taylor and Francis’ Architecture and Culture journal in 2025.
This conference was funded by the Cultural Research Centre, under Department of Communications and New Media and jointly held with the Asia Research Institute at NUS, as a culminative part of a research project entitled Foundations for Home-Based Work: A Singapore Study (NUS-IRB-2021-799; Project No. A-0008463-01-00), funded by MOE SSRTG, under Principal Investigator Associate Professor Lilian Chee, and Co-Investigators Professor Jane M. Jacobs, Professor Audrey Yue, and Associate Professor Natalie Pang.
Detailed programme
Keynote Abstracts
Asiya Islam
Working the night shift from home
The night shift is a key feature of outsourced call centre work. In the Global South, it offers global belonging premised on communication via information technology with the Global North, and additionally for women a visage of freedom. What are the geopolitical and gender dimensions of night shifts when they are transposed to the space of home, as has happened due to the Covid19 pandemic? This paper draws on recent fieldwork with young women in Delhi, working for global corporates, offering services (such as, customer support and data maintenance) using digital technology to overseas customers/clients. As the women navigated the rhythm of working the night shift from home as a result of lockdowns, they expressed a preference for phone conversations over in-person meetings. In this paper, I will discuss the method of phone interviews that, to a certain extent, mirrored the women’s working practices. While, in theory, these phone interviews could be conducted from anywhere in the world, sharing time and space with the women enabled access. I will, further elaborate upon women’s accounts of spatial and temporal challenges of working the night shift from home, including having to minimise domestic sounds (the whirring of a fan, food preparation, watching TV) that contradict their reiteration of the corporate language of ‘flexibility’ and ‘work life balance’. Together, these reflections on ethnographic labour and digital corporate labour during and after the Covid-19 pandemic will highlight the discrepancy between labour narratives and labour practices, and the limits to flexibility, under digital capitalism.
Sarah Holloway
Working in homes / Working from home: Entrepreneurial identities, business spatialities, and the security/precarity continuum amongst private tutors in England
Entrepreneurship is regarded by policy makers and politicians as an accelerant for economic development. Economic geography demonstrates that rather than stimulating entrepreneurship in general, policy makers should support specific forms of entrepreneurship that fuel wider growth. The paper’s original contribution is to insist that entrepreneurship research must also explore less growth-oriented, but crucially very widespread, forms of entrepreneurial activity. The paper therefore places solo self-employment – the self-employed without employees – centre stage as an exemplar of this trend. Research is presented on private tutors who run businesses from home, offering children one-to-one tuition in the burgeoning supplementary education industry. The paper scrutinises the causes, configuration and consequences of such solo self-employment as an economically marginal, but numerically dominant, form of entrepreneurship. First, it explores the multiple pathways into solo self-employment and the way these works deploy entrepreneurial subjectivities in crafting their home-centred businesses. Second, it considers dichotomous approaches to working in others or one’s own home, and the implications of Covid-19 for changing home-based business’ spatialities. Third, it reflects on the implications of working from home for workers differentially positioned in a security-precarity continuum.
Frances Holliss
Designing for Home-Based Work Post-Covid
Covid-19 has accelerated the growth of home-based work globally. WFH policies, adopted in countries across the world in an attempt to contain the virus, have had the effect of shifting what had previously been a largely invisible minority working practice into the visible mainstream. Unexpectedly successful with employers and employees alike, surveys indicate that this is likely to be a permanent shift, to some extent or another. While some want to work either from home or in the office full-time, most prefer a hybrid schedule of between one and four days a week working from home, with the rest of the week in a collective workplace. This has major implications for the built environment – at the scale of the city, the neighbourhood, the block, the building and the home or workplace. It is, of course, nothing new. Before the industrial revolution, working from home – or living at the workplace - was almost universal, often in buildings specifically designed for the dual-use. However, with the invention of the factory and mass transport systems, ‘going out to work’ became the dominant working practice. And over time, widespread disapproval for home-based work combined with the popularisation of Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City idea, to result in a culture of mono-functional buildings and functionally zoned cities. Twenty years’ research into the architecture of home-based work, carried out in phases primarily in the UK but also in the USA, Netherlands and Japan, has built a knowledge-base that may inform changes to both the theory and practice of how cities and buildings are designed, in the context of home-based work as a mainstream practice post-Covid. Based on an understanding of both the advantages and the disadvantages of home-based work, this paper will present a series of design principles and typologies that have emerged from this research. It will challenge commonly held ideas about which occupations can be carried out from home. And it will advocate for the fine-grained mixed-use that results from cities and buildings designed around home-based work, in terms of social, economic and environmental sustainability. It will draw on both historic precedent and contemporary buildings - vernacular and ‘high’ architecture. And it will discuss the issue of adaptive reuse, in the context of a predicted surplus of commercial buildings and a legacy of apartments built tight-fit to minimal space standards around limited and purely domestic programmes.
Melissa Gregg
Working from Home and the New Terms for Talent
In the sudden shift to remote work in March 2020, the rush to secure computers for everyone working and learning from home contributed to a global semiconductor supply shortage, made worse by a logistics bottleneck that crowded out shipping ports across the world. As the pandemic continued, the mainstream reliance on digital tools to keep society going created an unprecedented demand for silicon and software engineering talent, causing a notable “quit rate” in which workers traded up for higher salaries elsewhere. Meanwhile, in the United States, social unrest responding to racial violence made the workplace a site for unusual levels of political debate and discussion. Corporate protocol was temporarily upended, even if employees were not located in physical offices for these events. These multiple, intersecting impacts continue to effect the experience of digital labor years later. In contrast to my earlier research on working from home (Gregg 2011), this talk explains what changed about the employee/employer relationship during COVID, given the context of broader social inequities gaining attention. WFH went from being a rare experience—often disguised by employees struggling to fit family life around long hours—to an accepted, widespread and popular practice. The speed of change caught employers unprepared. Companies that thrived tended to be those already working with distributed, agile methodologies conducive to remote collaboration. Now, as employers seek to bring new hires together in an office for the first time, tension remains over whether location and physical presence truly matter in a highly competitive industry. As I will argue, tension over “return to office” policies not only suggests a new front for labor activism since COVID, it reflects a positive development in the longer history of working from home. The choice to be “remote only” is a necessary and overdue rejection of the place-bound requirement for participating in high tech work, and the narrow forms of reward and privilege to which it gave rise.
Organizing Committee
Dr. Lilian Chee (Principal Investigator), Associate Professor, Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore
Dr. Jane M. Jacobs, Professor, Division of Social Sciences, Yale-NUS College
Dr. Natalie Pang, Associate Professor, Department of Communications and New Media, National University of Singapore
Dr. Audrey Yue, Professor and Head of Department, Department of Communications and New Media, National University of Singapore
Ruella Che, Research Assistant, National University of Singapore
Rachel Sim, Research Assistant, National University of Singapore
Liyana Doneva, Research Assistant, National University of Singapore