Virtual Society? Get Real!
Paper abstracts

The Politics of Electronic Communication: Email, for instance
Steven D. Brown (Loughborough University) and Geoffrey Lightfoot (Keele University)

This paper discusses the findings of a qualitative study of two organisations at different stages in the adoption of Groupware and electronic Workflow technologies. The particular focus is upon the use of these systems for communication across organisational and managerial divisions. Users report two major functions serves by email communication – informing and relating. But the majority of issues which emerge around electronic communication deal with a third, less well defined political use of email. With regard to this function, users experience email as a quasi-formal space where their accountability is consistently at stake. This gives rise to a number of strategies aimed at negotiating such threats and establishing a favourable presence on the email system. Managers for their part are not only cognisant of this dimension of email use, but moreover have themselves developed a range of techniques for strategically prolonging potential conflicts to serve a variety of managerial goals. The implications of these strategies for the increased use of electronic communication in organisations are discussed.

I HATEYOU. ORG; A sociology of the VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES of CYBERHATE-GROUPS
Marco Diani, Sociologist,LOUEST - UMR CNRS 7544 Universitè de Paris, mdiani@mailhost.u-paris10.fr

In my paper I will present the results and outline some tentative conclusions of various years of " field research " conducted both in Europe and in the USA dealing with CYBERHATE. In particular, I will look at one very significant and paradoxical development of the VIRTUAL SOCIETY in cyberspace: all over the world CYBERHATE-GROUPS have actively embraced new electronic technologies (NETs) through which they are creating a global network of VIRTUAL POLITICAL COMMUNITIES.

The emergence of the information society (EU definition) or information superhighway (US definition) has transformed the "rules of engagement" in the virtual marketplace of ideas. Almost overnight, the new electronic technologies (NETs) now provide, through mediums like the Internet, direct access to millions of homes and institutions world-wide the communicative clout once the combined domain of newspapers, telephones, faxes, photo transmittal services, reference libraries and broadcast outlets.

Despite the deliberate intention to exploit NETs to create HATE-RELATED virtual political communities, there is little sociological research into the activities of CYBERHATE-GROUPS. Such research is necessary not only from academic interest, but as a means to offer to both national and international bodies insights into the changing language and tactics of CYBERHATE-GROUPS, various skinheads and extremists.

Because young people are generally the most enthusiastic users of NETs, CYBERHATE-GROUPS have developed new forms of cultural and political communities with a unique opportunity to cheaply, effectively and directly diffuse their "deviant discourses" to an unprecedented vast, diverse and impressionable audience. Limitless access to the Internet allows CYBERHATE-GROUPS to rapidly expand their activities under cover of a variety of seemingly innocuous and unrelated sites especially designed to attract young people (e.g. sites dedicated to music, comics, " counterculture ", etc.) and that facilitate their penetration into mainstream youth culture.

In my paper I will present some results from studies of such groups on the Internet, drawn from the analysis of over 1000 "problematic" web-sites, and will underline in particular the interrelations (both visible and invisible) among seemingly distant and "unrelated" websites. I will also reflect on the wider perspective and to identify the best ways forward, in particular asking the question : Is there anything that can be done? And how ?

For instance, is the US Department of Commerce's Telecommunication Information Agency correct when it recently concluded that the only way to respond to CYBERHATE-GROUPS is to employ the same technology to counter it?

There seems to be a host of good excuses to shy away from this kind of questions. First, there's the technology itself. It is complex and ever changing. Hateful speech is, in general, "protected speech," but is there any reason why, at a minimum, a recipient of any unsolicited and threatening message from the superhighway should not have the right to know instantly the source of the message ?

For instance, " Free speech " is a fundamental right guaranteed by the US Constitution. Hate speech has been afforded protection, while other types of offensive speech have been held outside the purview of the Constitution. It remains unclear how the distinction is made between the evil of defamation and child pornography versus the inherent evils of hate. Arguably, the rights of victims of hate speech have been subordinated to rights of freedom of speech.

It has been suggested that the Internet should be governed by an international entity. The UN or UNESCO could orchestrate a collective effort to develop policies for Internet use. The guidelines would function to preserve the rights of individuals around the globe. This is not to suggest that regulation would eradicate hate speech, but the lack of legislation tends to translates into approval: otherwise, it would be practically impossible to enforce hate speech restrictions on the Internet. At the very least, the United States should develop and support an anti-hate speech policy.

On the Internet, national legislations are often reduced to a mere "local ordinance": national differences are also very important : in Canada, hate speech is illegal, and it is illegal in France, Germany and Austria to deny the Holocaust. Human right groups have been instrumental in removing organisations affiliated with white nationalism, anti-Semitism, and the like to remote sites. While shifting hate groups to other host computers does not eliminate the problem, it may reduce the chance of someone accidentally stumbling on hate sites.

VIRTUAL SOCIETY should provide everyone with free speech, but not at the expense of others.

Where the virtual meets the real: Management, Skill and Innovation in the "Virtual Organisation"
John Hughes, Mark Rouncefield, Pete Tolmie (Univeristy of Lancaster) and Wes Sharrock (University of Manchester)

The study on which this proposed paper is based, focussed on the ways in which new organisational forms, such as virtual teams, 'expert programmes, and 'virtual customers', are instantiated in the day-to-day work within a rapidly changing organisation.

The organisation concerned is a major UK retail bank which, over the past decade, has been engaged in major concurrent changes in its working culture, technology and working practices. Integral to these strategic changes has been an increased reliance on IT along with attempts to develop organisational forms among management and other staff to facilitate flexible non-co-located work across organisational divides. The day-to-day task of implementing the changes has fallen on middle-management who, in effect, constitute a locus between the 'virtual' and the 'real' in having to deal with the inevitable contingencies that arise; contingencies to do with the wider organisational setting itself, and those to do with relationships with customers. This tension emerges particularly in the drive toward greater standardisation both of internal processes in the bank and in relationships with customers. The rhetoric of standardisation is pervasive in regard to staff procedures and customer policy. It is present, for example, in the attempt to 'reconfigure customers' by embedding typologies or models in decision support systems. Such 'virtual customers' are intended to be drawn upon in decision-making vis-a-vis loan applications and to support the shift toward sales. However, it is evident from the fieldwork that regular tensions arise between the systems and the actual, situated work that manager do where reliance on local knowledge and 'gut feeling' is as prominent as ever. Similarly, representations of working practices as part of Management Information and process models. Here our emphasis has been on the contingent ways in which such representations are achieved through negotiation among interested parties and also in their use.

In the paper we intend to focus on the ways in which the attempt to standardise, sometimes mathematise, working practices continues to depend upon local knowledge and relevance, local loyalties and constellations of assistance as well as the interactional work that co-presence provides. This will occasion some scepticism regarding the outcomes and effectiveness of new forms of organising work on the erosion of parochialism, traditional hierarchies and facilitating empowerment of the work force. 

On the Poverty of a Priorism Technology, Surveillance in the workplace and Employee Responses
David Mason, Gloria Lankshear, Sally Coates (University of Plymouth) and Graham Button (Xerox Research Centre Europe)

Questions concerning empowerment, surveillance, privacy and resistance have long been the focus of sociological studies of the labour process and of managerial strategies. In recent years, these issues have been given new prominence by developments in electronic technologies that embody surveillance capabilities.

Characteristically, lay and social science responses to these developments have been framed within one or more sets of a priori assumptions. The first suggests that technological developments exercise decisive influences over the way in which organisations function and develop. This essentially determinist position assumes that the very availability of a technological capacity will lead to its deployment. The second set of a priori assumptions concerns the nature of the employment relationship itself. Here it is assumed that the workplace can be characterised as one of struggle and conflict and that relations between management and employees are intrinsically oppositional. In such a model, the logic of management as control makes the deployment of the enhanced surveillance capacity of technology inevitable. When put together, these sets of assumptions give rise to a characteristic debate about the degree to which employees are able to resist the managerial consequences of enhanced surveillance capacity – the assumption being that they either must or should seek so to act.

The chapter will interrogate these assumptions by describing the results of research on a number of case studies of actual work situations. It will seek to show that whether or not a system’s surveillance capacity is utilised depend crucially on context. Thus, management makes calculations about the likely impact of implementation in terms of employee reaction, judging the benefits of utilisation against the costs of doing so. Here the status and gender of employees are among the issues taken into account. Often there are differences of view among managers and supervisors depending both on position in the organisational hierarchy and on functional responsibilities. In some cases, there is evidence of direct collusion by management and employees to circumvent both approved procedures and technological systems.

Similarly evidence suggests that employees’ responses are also highly contextual. Almost all employees in our study appear to recognise, and accept, monitoring and surveillance as routine aspects of their working lives. A few appeared unaware of the surveillance-capabilities of systems they used while many more saw them as little more than an extension of traditional forms of monitoring. Some respondents saw the apparently objective and auditable data produced by technological monitoring as a protection against unfair work distribution or accusations of dereliction. Moreover, contrary to much of the literature, and a good deal of public discussion, there was little evidence of employees regarding technological surveillance systems as a threat to privacy.

These data lead us to question the a priori assumptions that have, we argue, too often characterised writing in the sociology of work; particularly that relating to the deployment of new technologies.

Managing Knowledge and Expertise: The Public Service as a "Virtual Organizational Space"
Rob Shields, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, rshields@ccs.carleton.ca

This paper introduces a definition of the virtual as "real without being actual, ideal without being abstract" and its application in a study of the changing organizational space of, and employees workspaces in, a large bureaucracy over 250000 employees in size, the Government of Canada. A sense of the very long history of the virtual and its embeddedness in specific forms of social ritual provides the basis for a critical assessment of the idea of the agile "knowledge-based agency" and of the "virtual society". Taking a spatial view, we argue that these organizations are being recast as not only material but as virtual organizational spaces in which knowledge and expertise are to be shepherded in relation to another virtual space - and we must insist that it is virtual - widely popularized as the "global".

The management of what we define as "virtual knowledge" and the translation operations between global and local knowledge-types is an important field of conflicts over the conditions of work and the status of labourers as much as of citizens. The paper outlines research hypotheses concerning the impact on legislation in place, on equity frameworks and on struggles over the circuits and technologies by which virtual knowledge is "set" into embodied know-how and tacit forms of expertise and partial-knowledge shared across teams.

This research is supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada’s "Challenges and Opportunities of the Knowledge-Based Economy" Strategic Theme.

Teleworking: Good for whose health?
Barbara Steward, University of East Anglia, b.p.steward@uea.ac.uk

Teleworking is widely predicted to bring health benefits to individual workers, through the elimination of stress and the enhancement of autonomy. Evidence for such effects is derived from teleworkers’ subjective accounts and objective reports of reductions in sickness absence. Yet teleworking is not emerging as an employment choice by employers or employees.

My presentation will report the findings of my doctoral study of telework. Funded by the Department of Health, it explores the meaning of illness and the experiences of taking sickness leave through the narratives and diary records of forty-four teleworkers. Essentially qualitative in design, the study examines both the lived experience of teleworking and what constituted illness for people working this way. These workers were elusive and not easily defined, but appeared to form a group at the periphery of mainstream employment. Each participant provided a detailed narrative account of his or her work history and transition to telework. They subsequently completed a longitudinal survey, completing five questionnaires concerning their work and health experiences in the preceding fortnight. Initial analyses of these findings were taken back for participant validation and further discussion of individual health experiences in a final in-depth interview.

The findings suggest that telework effects spatial and temporal boundaries. Telework often occurs in marginal spaces, compressed into small spaces minimally effecting the normal domestic functions of the home. Telework has a pronounced effect on time calculation, encouraging the extension of the working day, but more importantly changing the calculation of hours worked. Teleworkers reports suggest that home-based and computer-based work combine to make illness difficult to define when it is no longer associated with conventional fitness to work. The constant presence of work to the worker, the coterminous boundary of work and home, and their ability to work despite symptoms encouraged the non-recognition, or containment, of illness. Teleworkers often do not seek leave of absence for sickness, especially when this placed the privilege of home-based work or continued employment at risk. They suggested that the health and happiness of telework employers became the personal responsibility of individuals, absolving employers of their accountability for health and safety. These effects of encourage them to work longer into illness, during illness and/or return sooner in convalescence.

Teleworkers often like to work at home in order to avoid the negative effects of working at an office, but trade this off against high workloads, long working hours and lost opportunities for legitimate sickness leave. The implications for health are clearly apparent. Telework may have serious, but often masked effects for the health of the workforce. These were not limited to unskilled workers or to women with small children, as might be expected, but were reported by the whole group. Telework, often used as an exemplar of new technological and virtual employment, has been shown to have unexpected negative implications for health which need further examination.