Abstract
Western ideas about work have developed as macro and micro level changes continue to shape the social relations of work. As anywhere working developed as an alternative to traditional work arrangements in the 1990s, a system of checks and balances ensured the work practice delivered customer service and product quality. Western low-context work cultures situated the work practice as a logical development in the chronology of the social relations of work. With its tipping-point in the West reached, anywhere working received less attention in high-context work cultures. Specifically, this chapter investigates how the concept of “national culture” impacts thinking about anywhere working. In the high-context work cultures of East and South East Asia, employers, employees, and the stakeholders of organizations and governments have divergent views about the legitimacy of this work practice. The chapter discusses the influence of national culture on thinking about anywhere working in high-context work cultures, drawing on current data concerning anywhere working in selected Asian economies.
TopBackground
From a Western perspective, anywhere working provides opportunities to utilize non-traditional workspaces and new employment relationships in a variety of industrial sectors and organizational types, in both for-profit and not-for-profit settings. Although anywhere working appears ostensibly as a uniform practice, the literature reveals subtle points of difference (Nilles, 1976; Hislop et al., 2015).
Ideas about telework, virtual work, and other forms of anywhere working tracked the rapid advances in ‘information, digital and mobile technologies in business and personal communication’ [abbreviated as ICT]. Although ICT shape thinking about flexible ways of working, Garrett and Danziger (2007) suggest interpretations should tacitly recognize the legitimacy of traditional understandings about work, workplaces, and organizations as points of comparison.
To this end, the four pillars of anywhere working in the West posit that it:
- 1.
Occurs in places external to an organization’s designated workplace.
- 2.
Depends on increasingly sophisticated ICT to facilitate flexible types of work.
- 3.
Reduces the time a person devotes to traditional work within the organization’s workplace.
- 4.
Creates numerous types of employment relationships with a range of work options available to employers and employees.
In the West, organizations have management protocols, systems, policies, process, legal edicts, and ethical obligations to bind its employees. These functional elements of traditional work settings are topics canvassed within most textbooks on management and organizations (Samson & Daft, 2015) and human resource management [HRM] (Boxall, Purcell, & Wright, 2008). However, these elements emerge as problematic grey areas when applied to flexible working options.
Anywhere working is a logical outcome of a rapidly expanding and increasingly sophisticated ICT infrastructure (cf. Lin, 2012). As employers (with managers as their proxies) establish bring your own device [BYOD] workspaces and build sophisticated workstations, the potential for people today to work anywhere grows. Mobile technologies make flexible working arrangements [FWAs] an option previously unavailable to most employees (Lake, 2013). Today, working from a home office, work hub, or hot desk is commonplace.
Key Terms in this Chapter
National Culture: National culture is the norms, behaviors, beliefs, customs, and values shared by the population of a sovereign nation (e.g., a Chinese or Canadian national culture). It refers to specific characteristics such as language, religion, ethnic and racial identity, cultural history and traditions.
Social Interpretation: Proactive engagement of workers required to negotiate and interpret organizational life and workplace relations – attaching meaning to phenomena that reinforce the patterned nature of social life.
Sociological Paradigm: An established theory that guides thinking and research in sociology. Such theory aims to gain a deeper understanding of society.
Work Organization: Seeks to optimize the interaction between employees, equipment and information to enhance the cost of efficiency of work processes while at the same time maintaining the performance, motivation and skills of employees.
Psychology of Behavior: Indistinct concept: contingent behavior and unconscious motivation offer paradigm-type explanations of how people react to organizational life and workplace relations.
Culture: Culture is the characteristics and knowledge of a group of people or society, which encompasses language, customs and the spiritual, material, intellectual, and emotional elements of everyday life.
Meaning of Work: Perceiving one’s work to be meaningful or purposeful and to serve a higher and unconscious motivation offer paradigm-type explanations of how people react to organizational life and workplace relations.
Social facts: Social systems and structures and their extensions in organizational life and workplace relations – for example, roles, values, control rewards.
Axial Principles: These are the deep level universalistic principles that shape how people respond to or think about the cardinal dimensions of daily life – for example, the meaning of work, how the cosmos works, causality, and the temporal nature of existence.
Social Relations of Work: In social science, social relations refer to any relationship between two or more individuals. Social relations derived from individual agency form the basis of social structure and are studied by sociologists such as Max Weber.