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Item Negotiating the networks : a study of telework within chartered accountancy firms in Aotearoa New Zealand : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Massey University, Manawatu Campus, New Zealand(Massey University, 2017) Jones, Leslie DavidIs telework an acceptable work practice among chartered accountancy firms here in Aotearoa New Zealand? Probably not, according to the research by Rasmusson and Corbett (2008), although their research was not specific to chartered accountancy firms. In fact, there have been no specific studies of the acceptance or otherwise of telework by chartered accountancy firms in the New Zealand context. In the international context, North American research suggests that telework is supported by chartered accountancy firms as a way of retaining skilled staff, especially women accountants, because of the feminisation of the profession (Kranz, 2008). On the other hand, Lightbody (2008), in the Australian context disagrees, citing the accountancy culture of work hard, desire for promotion and the need to put the firm first as marginalising accountants who wished to work at home. This thesis, addresses this question in the New Zealand context. Studying only those few chartered accountancy firms that accept telework as a work practice, this thesis asks: What is it about how these firms are organised that allows accounting actors to be located productively in their homes? In answering this question, the directors and managers of the participating firms were interviewed and their resulting stories analysed using a form of analysis drawn from Actor Network Theory, a research framework not previously used by telework researchers. The results of this study show how the traditional networks of the chartered accountancy firm grounded in the office predominate. As a result, the networks of the home have been only marginally successful in intruding into the networks of such firms.Item Flexible work and disciplined selves : telework, gender and discourses of subjectivity : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology at Massey University(Massey University, 1997) Armstrong, NicolaHome-based work employing information and communications technologies (telework) is held up in contemporary academic literatures, policy formulations and the popular media as the cure to a panoply of contemporary problems, particularly the difficulties of combining caring responsibilities and careers. This thesis takes up the question of how teleworkers talk about and practise home-based business. It pivots on the exploration of the simultaneity of parenting, partnering and paid work for home-based business people. The 'teleworking tales' of eleven home-based entrepreneurs form the heart of the thesis, as they discuss their negotiation of 'home' and 'work' where the usual temporal and spatial boundaries between these arenas are removed. While previous studies assume that telework is 'family-friendly', most do not investigate the perspectives of other family members on the effect of home-based business on their households and relationships. This thesis speaks into this silence in the literature by contextualising telework within family relations, including as participants the partners, children and child care workers of the eleven home-based businesswomen and men, interviewing thirty people in all. Three strands of analysis regarding discourses of the organisation, domesticity and entrepreneurship were pursued in relation to these 'teleworking tales'. It was found that these 'tales' were told differently by teleworking women and men, the women focusing on the untenable nature of continued organisational employment as women and mothers, while the men established home-based businesses because of declining employment security and redundancy. In the midst of these constituting relations, the discursive injunction to be a 'fit worker' and a 'good parent' had different implications for the women and men; where as the women negotiated home-based entrepreneurship through domesticity, the men navigated their way around domesticity in order to maintain a singular focus on their businesses. The effect of the cross-cutting axes of domesticity and entrepreneurship significantly curtailed the opportunity for teleworking to represent a new crafting of the relationship between 'home' and 'work' as teleworkers negotiated the simultaneous demands their families and businesses made upon them. It was also the case that home-based businesses were a source of pleasure and of productive forms of power which encouraged home-based entrepreneurs to watch over and discipline themselves. The research unfolds as both a warning and a promise with regard to the 'choice' to telework, in terms of what is 'chosen' and how that is 'controlled'. It is particularly a contribution to current debates regarding the complex patterning of gendered and familial practices which continually fragment the freedoms promised by the discourse of entrepreneurship.