THE ELECTRONIC COTTAGE
Given the necessary tools, the IFF found, many of the present duties of the secretary “could be done from home as well as in the office. Such a system would increase the labor pool by allowing married secretaries caring for small children; it home to continue to work… There may beno overriding reason why a secretary could not just as well, in many instances, take dictation at home and type the text on a home terminal which produces a clean text at the author’s home or office.”
In addition, IFF continued, “Many of the tasks performed by engineers, draftsmen, and other white-collar employees might be done from home as readily as, or sometimes more readily than, from the office.” One “seed of the future” exists nlready in Britain, for example, where a company called F. International Ltd. (the “F” stands for Freelance) employs 400 part-time computer programmers, all but a handful of whom work in their own homes. The company, which organizes teams of programmers for industry, has expanded to Holland andScandinavia and counts among its clients such giants as British Steel, Shell, and Unilever. “Home computer programming,” writes the Guardian newspaper, is “the cottage industry of the 1980s.”
In short, as the Third Wave sweeps across society, we find more and more companies that can be described, in the words of one researcher, as nothing but “people huddled around a computer.” Put the computer in people’s homes, and they no longer need to huddle. Third Wave white-collar work, like Third Wave manufacturing, will not require 100 percent of the work force to be concentrated in the workshop.
One should not-underestimate the difficulties entailed in transferring work from its Second Wave locations in factory and office to its Third Wave location in the home. Problems of motivation and management, of corporate and social reorganization will make the shift both prolonged and, perhaps, painful. Nor can all communication be handled vicariously. Some jobs—especially those involving creative deal-making, where each decision is nonroutine—require much face- to-face contact. Thus Michael Koerner, President of Canada Overseas Investments, Ltd,, says, “We all need to be within a thousand feet of one another.”
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