Abstract
The applied cultural analysis work presented in this article was conducted with independent professionals who work in a flexible time-space format – known as telework – for the entertainment, new media, and arts sector in the Los Angeles area. Most participants are associates of the production and post-production boutique “Studio Can” as well as the curatorial new media and arts nonprofit organization “PalMarte.” When working in a flexible time-space format, boundaries between leisure/family life and work at home, or personal and public realms, tend to become blurred. This blurred context involves a web of cultural complexity that exists behind the materialization of boundaries. Through empirical material, this article examines rhythms and mechanisms between flexibility and stability, unveiling a viscous consistency of everyday life. This work helps to better understand the relation between leisure/family life and work at home, as well as stability and change, to rethink these realms and how they relate to each other but also how they transform one another. Although culturally different, these realms are bridged through the material culture that surrounds them. As conveyors, objects (such as a heating pad) and activities culturally transport participants between realms. Research methods combined time-diaries, interviews, observation, visual ethnography, and autoethnography. While applying academic knowledge into a non-academic setting to rethink realms and how they relate and transform each other in a bridged relationship, this work is also an invitation to rethink the relationship between the realms of academia and non-academia.
Highlights
It was Sunday evening and I was sitting at my desk at home
This thesis focuses on flexible work, known as telework, that is done through the use of information communication technology (ICT) devices in the entertainment, new media and arts sector
The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s (2007) perspective of stability divides time between a present and chaotic liquid modernity that is built on light software-based products, and a stable past where solid goods as well as social norms structured people’s lives. The problem of this statement is that it dichotomically assumes that we are much more lost and chaotic today than we were in the past. This assumption asks for a bit of a closer analysis in a cultural perspective that looks for details and routines we develop to organize everyday life and control chaos
Summary
It was Sunday evening and I was sitting at my desk at home. Using the mouse of my computer I clicked on the new message icon that had the image of a piece of stationary and a yellow pencil on it. These elements may mix into what American author Dalton Conley (2009) calls “weisure" – work and leisure – or the home-office, which according to this author tends to take people to the 24/7 (24 hours / 7 days a week) mode of living, at least in one place of the Western part of the globe, the United States In this context of blended boundaries, much is said about work overload in the everyday life of a country where the belief that “to do nothing is to be nothing” (Robinson & Godbey, 1997, p.45) represents a strong component of its culture. As pointed by Introna, Cushman and Moore (n.d.), these unconventional and mercurial characteristics turn this field into “an instance of the virtual organization” (p. 1) where time-space flexibility implications can be analyzed
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