Home-based telework is one of the flexible working options available today and is unique in its ability to physically and emotionally blur the boundaries between work and home. This paper explores how men experience working from home, how they construct their identities as workers and as parents in this ambiguous location, and how, as fathers, they manage the emotional work of reconciling family and career in this context. Our findings suggest that in order to manage the emotional aspects of telework men will, at times, focus on either the professional or parental part of their identity in their narratives, and at times attempt to 'have it all'. We conclude that telework can provide a space where men can adopt emotional discourses and practices traditionally associated with women, and particularly working mothers.Keywords: fatherhood, emotion, telework, identity, masculinity Introduction Our aim in this paper is to explore the ways in which emotions 'play a central role in contributing to our sense of self' (Lupton, 1998, p5-6) looking specifically at the emotions involved in the expression and experience of fatherhood and career by men working from home. We identify a gap in the literature regarding men and the management of emotion at work more generally, and the emotional management of the dualist demands of fatherhood and working life specifically: a gap that is in direct contrast to the wealth of literature which focuses on the 'dual' roles of women in work and family life. Through adopting a social constructionist perspective we explore here how 7 men (a sub-set of a larger study) construct their identities as workers and as parents within the indeterminate context of home working, and how as fathers, they manage the emotional work of reconciling family and career in this environment. We do this through the presentation of 3 case studies.We begin the paper by discussing the context of home-based telework, examining how this might be a useful location in which to explore how men construct their identities. We see emotion as key to our understanding of identities because we view the discourses of emotion as one of the major routes through which identity is produced. Furthermore, these emotional discourses are often gender orientated, leading us to discuss how masculinity and emotion have traditionally been theorised and ask: Is there emotional work involved in men working from home, and if so, what form does it take, and how do men manage it? We explore this question and describe the research methods we employed, before presenting our interpretations of our findings. We conclude by exploring the significance of these findings in the final sections.
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