THE ELECTRONIC COTTAGE
If significant numbers of employees in the manufacturing sector could be shifted to the home even now, then it is safe to say that a considerable slice of the white-collar sector— where there are no materials to handle—could also make that transition.
Indeed, an unmeasured but appreciable amount of work is already being done at home by such people as salesmen and saleswomen who work by phone or visit, and only occasionally touch base at the office; by architects and designers; by a burgeoning pool of specialized consultants in many industries; by large numbers of human-service workers like therapists or psychologists; by music teachers and language instructors; by art dealers, investment counselors, insurance agents, lawyers, and academic researchers; and by many other categories of white-collar, technical, and professional people.
These are, moreover, among the most rapidly expanding work classifications, and when we suddenly make available technologies that can place a low-cost “work station” in any home, providing it with a “smart” typewriter, perhaps, along with a facsimile machine or computer console and teleconferencing equipment, the possibilities for home work are radically extended.
Given such equipment, who might be the first to make the transition from centralized work to the “electronic cottage”? While it would be a mistake to underestimate the need for direct face-to-face contact in business, and all the subliminal and nonverbal communication that accompanies that contact, it is also true that certain tasks do not require much outside contact at all—or need it only intermittently.
Thus “low-abstraction” office workers for the most part perform tasks— entering data, typing, retrieving, totaling columns of figures, preparing invoices, and the like—that require few, if any, direct face-to-face transactions. They could perhaps be most easily shifted into the electronic cottage. Many of the “ultrahigh-abstraction” workers— researchers, for example, and economists, policy formulators, organizational designers—require both high-density contact with peers and colleagues and ‘times to work alone. There are times when even deal-makers need to back off and do their “homework.”
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