This article focuses on 'connected freelancers' as a category of teleworkers and examines the pressures placed on their workhome balance by their relationship with clients. Based on diaries, questionnaires and interviews, it reveals that, while connected freelancers do not generally work excessively long hours, they do work irregular hours. This is because 'work always wins' in a conflict with domestic commitments, a phenomenon the article dubs 'client colonisation'. Client colonisation was a source of anxiety for respondents, who found themselves continually thinking about the current and future projects on which their livelihoods depend. The article illustrates the porous ways in which they interleave work with non-work activities and contrasts traditional 'monochronic' forms of work with emerging 'polychronic' forms, which erode work-home boundaries. It concludes that a new model of work-one in which individual patterns of control over workhome balance are paramount-already coexists alongside traditional models but is still insufficiently socially understood and accepted.
Various economic and social pressures have, arguably, combined to effect a shift in both the reality and perceptions of career structures. Recent debates have centred on the extent to which traditional organizational careers have given way to self-employment for a client portfolio. This article builds on distinctions between `subjective', `objective' and `organizational' careers to analyse how individuals manage the transition from a traditional to a portfolio-based career. It focuses on freelance translators, a group of workers with a long history of working outside organizations, and draws out some of the factors involved in their successful transition from employment to self-employment. It evaluates the constraints on creating portfolio careers, particularly the role of safety nets and professional networks, and explores the `organizing principles' to which translators refer in creating coherent narratives of their working lives. The article concludes that, in the absence of an organizational structure, clear identification of such principles proves to be critical for translators in defining both successful transitions and successful careers.
It is accepted that teleworkers generally manage the balance between their home and working lives by establishing temporal and physical boundaries between the two along a continuum of role integration-segmentation. What is less understood is the nature of the relationship between temporal and physical boundaries, and how teleworkers control constituent elements of physical boundaries to secure their preferred location along the continuum. Based on 20 interviews with self-employed teleworkers, this article examines the ways in which successful control of time depends largely on the successful control of space. It investigates in particular how teleworkers attempt to control space by breaking it down into constituent elements involving equipment, activities and ambiance.
Recent literature has begun to disaggregate groups of the `self-employed without employees' to examine in greater detail what determines their working conditions. This article continues this trend by presenting the findings of a survey of professional translators and discussing their status as `homeworkers', `teleworkers', and `portfolio workers'. It reveals that freelance translators enjoy higher levels of autonomy and control over their working conditions than other comparable self-employed groups. This is largely because the nature of their expertise and their relationship with clients create inelasticities in the supply of their skills. The more successful are then able to use their market position to exert substantial control over areas like pay and deadlines. In addition, the lack of a traditional career structure means that many translators have actively chosen freelance work and that even those who were originally forced into it would not now take an in-house job. The article concludes that labour market characteristics are a key factor in determining differences in working conditions between various groups of `portfolio workers'.
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