The Product of Availability: Understanding the Economic
Underpinnings of Constant Connectivity
Melissa Mazmanian
Department of Informatics
University of California, Irvine
[email protected]
ABSTRACT
Constant connectivity and total availability to clients is the
rule rather than the exception in many contemporary
workplaces. Enabled by developments in information and
communication technologies (ICTs), total availability of
employees is possible and presumed. Scholars have
explored how new technological affordances, cultural
shifts, individual personality traits, and/or the development
of social expectations that reinforce norms of constant
connectivity have led to this state of affairs. We argue that a
key factor has been overlooked in current scholarship about
stress, intensive work, and constant connectivity. That is,
current economic conditions are creating a marketplace in
which firms increasing sell the availability of their
employees as part of the services offered by the firm. In this
paper we use qualitative data to illustrate how total
availability is an integral aspect of the ‘product’ offered by
professional service firms and is becoming increasingly
prevalent in other service industries. We conclude with a
discussion of how the HCI community might address this
situation as a design challenge. Drawing on the work of
Goffman and Perlow, we suggest that designers attend to
the ways in which organizations might maintain front stage
impressions of total availability while collectively
managing individual time to restrict total availability behind
the scenes.
Author Keywords
Knowledge work; mobile technology; time and temporality;
service work; economic constraints; markets of availability.
ACM Classification Keywords
K.4.3. Computers and Society: Organizational Impacts
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2557381
Ingrid Erickson
School of Communication &
Information
Rutgers University
[email protected]
INTRODUCTION
In the United States, and increasingly across the globe, we
have come to take it as a given that many contemporary
workplaces are characterized by constant connectivity, long
hours, regular stress, and a frenzied pace [10, 20, 24, 44, 46,
57, 71].
Researchers from the HCI community, as well as scholars
from fields such as management, sociology and science and
technology studies have a long history of contributing to the
discourse surrounding the pressures of contemporary work
[2, 25, 27, 37-40, 51, 63, 65]. Collectively, their findings
affirm the conditions of technostress [65] and suggest that
unsustainable work patterns are damaging to individual
health [13, 21, 32, 73], social institutions such as family and
marriage [6, 9, 26], and even productivity and
organizational effectiveness [45, 61].
Research on constant connectivity and contemporary work,
primarily in a Western context, tends to rely on four key
lenses to explore shifts toward increasingly intense work
environments and unsustainable temporal relations: (1)
technological innovations; (2) cultural imperatives; (3)
social dynamics; and (4) psychological drivers. All of these
perspectives contribute to our understanding of the complex
sociotechnical dynamics at play in current workplaces.
However, we contend that this conversation is missing a
key component: economic exchange. To date, scholars have
failed to acknowledge that ‘availability’—the term we use
herein to denote the sociotechnical state of being constantly
connected and accessible to others—has become an integral
aspect of the ‘product’ being bought and sold in a number
of knowledge and service industries.
Our data suggests that service firms in industries as diverse
as corporate law to hotel management have begun to
compete for business largely, if not primarily, on the basis
of their employees’ willingness to be available to clients
and customers 24/7. As Phillip, a corporate attorney whom
we interviewed, neatly summarizes,
I think it's a fact of 21st Century law that you get
business by being responsive and the more responsive
you are, the more business you get. So, if you're not
returning phone calls in an hour and you're not
responding to emails almost immediately, people are
upset. It's ridiculous, but if someone down the street is
offering that service, you need to compete with it.
We build our argument about the economic underpinnings
of professional availability on a set of qualitative interviews
with individuals from a variety of jobs (investment bankers,
venture capitalists, lawyers, shoe salesmen, consultants,
hotel management, hotel sales). These data suggest the need
to unpack the ways that economic exchange figures into
temporal work relations, which is our objective in the first
half of this paper. Specifically, we look at how employee
availability has become part of the economic exchange
between organizations and their clients/customers, how the
transactional relationship between availability and client
service as a source of competitive advantage is moving into
new industries, and how individuals understand their
behavior as part of current work imperatives.
We follow our initial examination with a discussion of how
the CHI community might address this economic reality as
a design challenge. Rather than focus largely on
interventions that address individual or intra-organizational
practices, our analysis suggests there is room for an
alternate approach. We begin by imagining what this might
look like, first, by examining the collective approach that
management scholar Leslie Perlow articulates in her work
[45, 46]. Next, we build on Perlow’s insights using
Goffman’s dramaturgical metaphor [22] of front stages and
back stages. This extension, admittedly nascent, is meant to
incite designers to further develop solutions that might
enable an organization to maintain its ‘front stage’ of
economically-driven constant availability while allowing
temporal flexibility for its employees ‘back stage’.
In sum, managing time, disruptions, and availability has
been a fruitful area for research and intervention in the
CHI/CSCW community for decades [2, 29, 30, 47, 72]. We
contribute to this line of research by suggesting how
scholars might take into account the structural economic
factors that underlie current temporal relations in their
attempts to facilitate more sustainable working
environments. This perspective challenges assumptions
embedded in traditional visions of ubiquitous computing
oriented around creating anytime/anywhere access to
information [14, 15] and provides a fruitful avenue for
reflective design [60]. We conclude by imagining how
researchers and developers might rally to design
interventions that take this disregarded, but substantive,
factor into account when addressing the individual, group
and organizational work practices.
LITERATURE
Scholars have a longstanding interest in understanding the
various factors that have led to current norms of intensive
work, stress, and constant connectivity. While, to some
degree or another, existing research takes into account the
variety of cultural, technological, social and individual
aspects that affect current temporal work conditions,
disciplinary perspectives tend to focus on different levels of
analysis and, in so doing, shed light on the different angles
of this complex issue. We review four of the most common
analytical lenses that have been used to understand issues
regarding availability.
Technological capacities perspectives attend to the ways
that developments in information and communication
technologies (ICTs) create an intensification of temporal
work relations and increased interruptions [1, 31, 36, 40,
55, 68]. This perspective reflects at least a soft
technological determinist position [62] by its direct linkage
of the emergence of networked and wireless computing to
specific temporal impacts on individuals, organizations, and
social units as well as new forms of labor, ways of thinking,
and sources of stress.
Cultural evolutionary perspectives, on the other hand, trace
the ways in which contemporary orientations toward
progress, speed, and compressed linear time are effects of
modernity [7, 28, 59, 66, 67, 74]. (See [70] for a
comprehensive overview of theoretical perspectives in this
tradition). While research here takes into account broad
shifts in infrastructural and technological capacities, this
lens focuses primarily on the ways in which culture
continues to adapt toward increased efficiency, perpetual
technological progress, and global connectivity. These
cultural shifts thus form the basis by which we direct our
efforts and understand our lives.
Social normative and interpersonal perspectives take as a
starting point that current temporal work conditions are
socially defined. Focus here is directed on the ways in
which groups and collectives create and legitimize temporal
structures [49] by repeated, contextualized actions, often
through the use of information and communication
technologies. This stream of research explores how shared
temporal relations emerge, shape individual action, and
influence the degree to which any one person can assert
autonomy over availability without offending collective
norms [3, 5, 11, 17, 35, 41, 43]. In short, temporal norms,
like other professional norms, emerge by virtue of
continued social negotiation until they appear so routine as
to become invisible.
Finally, psychological or individual traits perspectives on
availability highlight how individual orientations like
workaholism or competitiveness render some individuals
prone to intense and unsustainable work practices. Research
in this area reveals how individuals express intrinsic
polychronic or monochronic orientations to time, which in
turn affects their experience of work-related stress [12, 33,
50]. Findings also showcase the degree to which individuals
are vulnerable to workplace pressures and amenable to
developing obsessive and ‘addictive’ relationships with
colleagues [19, 23, 44, 54, 56, 69].
Given the amount of research and broad focus represented
by these various perspectives, it is remarkable that none
theorize about the degree to which economic conditions
play a role in current practices of availability in
contemporary workplaces. While the work of Barley and
colleagues on the commodification of work [48] and
technical contractor labor markets [4, 18], as well as
Edwards and Wajcman’s work on the politics of working
life [16] attend to the role of labor markets in current work
environments, even these scholars do not directly link
practices of constant connectivity with economic markets of
worker availability.
In actuality, economic and labor conditions are key factors
in each of the perspectives outlined above. Such factors
play a key role in: the ways in which cultural orientations
toward progress and speed figure in to everyday experience
of work; how technologies that enable connectivity are
understood and enacted in practice; how communication
norms evolve among colleagues; and whether or not
individuals see themselves as having their ‘own’ time.
The economic value of time has long been a taken-forgranted aspect of elite professional service occupations
such as law firms, but our research suggests that it is
becoming increasingly prevalent in other industries as well.
There is a new market for total (24/7) availability that has
come to play a defining role in how organizations
understand and advertise the ‘product’ they are offering to
customers and clients. This, as a result, impacts the agency
organizations and individuals have over time, both in
traditionally professional and personal contexts. In the
following sections we offer empirical details to corroborate
this claim.
METHODS AND DATA
This paper is the product of almost a decade of inductive
research on the use and experience of communication
technologies by professionals in the United States. Over a
series of four integrated research projects, the first author
conducted more than 200 semi-structured interviews with
elite service professionals: corporate attorneys (2004-2005)
and
in-house
attorneys
(2005-2008);
investment
banking/private equity (2004-2005) and management
consultants (2007-2009); sales representatives -- footwear
(2005-2008) and hotel sales (2012-2013); and vice
presidents, directors, and managers of a hotel management
firm (2012-2013). In addition to interviewing, other
qualitative ethnographic methods (specifically, direct
observation, shadowing) were used in each research project.
The focus of each study was to understand daily work
practices, use of communication technologies, and
organizational norms. While the data that that inform our
thesis are not derivative of a single study, collectively they
provide a broad picture of a normative professional shift
toward constant connectivity within different occupations
over the last decade. All data reported herein were analyzed
through methods aligned with grounded theory, including
multiple rounds of inductive coding and iterative cycles
between coding and theorizing [8, 64]. Additional details
about data collection and analysis can be found in prior
publications [41, 42, 43].
We leverage this combined data set to interrogate how ideas
about ‘product,’ labor, and service figure into norms,
actions, and experiences surrounding technology-enabled
availability in a variety of professions and organizational
contexts. Our initial theorizing leads us to the insight that,
for some service providers, employee availability has
become an integral aspect of the ‘product’ sold to clients. In
order to unpack this insight further, we compare the
experiences of elite professional service providers
(investment bankers, corporate lawyers, management
consultants) with those in less lucrative and less prestigious
occupations such as sales representatives (footwear and
hotel sales) and hotel management. This comparison
highlights salient commonalities and differences among the
emergent phenomenon of total availability.
FINDINGS
Our data suggest that organizations in a variety of servicerelated industries are promising (either explicitly or
implicitly) 24/7 access to employees as part of the services
offered to customers and clients. Rather than providing a
static ‘product’ (whether it be strategic advice, sales
numbers, or a legal opinion) firms are selling availability as
an integral part of the product. The ability to reach an
employee at all hours of the day has become an assumed
right of clients working with elite service professionals.
Individuals in these occupations are aware of this norm and
take for granted that being available is part of doing
business in a competitive marketplace. For these
professionals, accessibility to clients has become
normalized over time, creeping in intensity as infrastructure
and technologies enable ubiquitous communication and
easier transfer of information across distance. For others,
total availability is actively being introduced in new
contexts as a way to gain strategic competitive advantage.
Once total availability is integrated into the product sold by
a particular company, or across an industry, individuals
who strive to be successful have little choice but to put
themselves in the position of being available, rationalizing
their behavior as part of operating in a 21st century
capitalist marketplace.
Selling availability
Elite service professionals, such as management consultants
and corporate attorneys, equate 24/7 availability to “client
service”. Lawyers are particularly articulate about the ways
in which availability is sold as part of the legal product.
Mike, a partner in a corporate law firm, is straightforward
about the link between access and product:
Well you try to be as responsive as possible. It’s
always been that way. We sell our time. We sell our
access. That’s what we sell. And as technology has
made response times shorter, it has empowered people
in a quicker fashion. And as we are able to respond
faster that’s what the marketplace for our services is
going to demand.
Asked about the relationship between productivity and
accessibility, Matt, a senior partner in the same firm, ties
these two concepts under the same umbrella: if productivity
is measured by keeping clients, and keeping clients requires
responsiveness, availability becomes the marker for
productivity. According to Matt,
Well, in a service business like ours, responsiveness
equates to productivity, in that if you have a happy
client you're going to be successful, that's the business.
This relationship is clearly one sided. Client service is
exactly that – serving the client. Hillary, a partner in the
same law firm, reflects on the structurally unequal
relationship between lawyers and their clients,
I have a client in Omaha who doesn’t have a cell
phone, doesn’t check email. But he is very aware of
the current norms on this end. He is completely
comfortable with the dichotomy that he can reach me
anytime any day and I can’t reach him. That’s his
right as the client. Actually, I have several clients who
have no problem being the benefactor of current
social norms. That is one of the things I have to tell
Associates. They think, “Well my client won’t mind if I
don’t check my email after 6 because they don’t check
theirs.” That’s not the case. The client has entirely
different standards for you then they do for
themselves.
Unlike lawyers, venture capitalists, investment bankers and
management consultants seem to take this aspect of the
economic exchange for granted. These professionals slip
assumptions about accessibility and service into
conversation, not as a topic worth mentioning, but rather as
a framing context for whatever point they are trying to
make. For instance, Adam, a consultant, wonders whether
partners could turn down the “spigot of requests” from
clients, noting, “Clients are trained to think that we are at
their disposal.” Similarly, Viet, a partner in the same firm,
describes his entire relationship to availability with the
simple phrase, “At the end of the day, our job is to please
clients.”
Creeping availability
Knowledge professionals often refer to infrastructural and
technological shifts related to information transfer when
reflecting on the current relationship between client service
and availability. When asked about the role of smartphones
in temporal work practices, the number of professionals
who answered the question in terms of the development of
the fax machine or introduction of FedEx delivery on
weekends was striking.
Roger, a partner in a private equity firm, recalls,
When I started working fax machines were just
starting. And before long it was like, “oh my gosh,
how could you not be able to get something back
automatically,” and then FedEx changed, and started
shipping documents overnight. I guess what happens
is that once it gets assimilated, it gets to be the
expectation of how we work and communicate.
Mark, a partner in a corporate law firm, remembers a
similar evolution in accessibility and the attendant shift in
his relationship with clients.
When I started FedEx wasn’t even around. There was
carbon paper and White-Out and we had Telex. And
FedEx was just starting out. But when FedEx went to
late pickup on a Friday night at 8:00 it was like, “Oh,
this is the end of the world, this is going to ruin our
weekends.” And then when they went to Saturday
pickup and it got even worse, you know, we thought it
couldn’t get any worse but it did. Really I think the
biggest change was widespread adoption of email. I
mean that was the big change. … You can’t
underestimate the impact of this technology.
Mark goes on to relate the shifts in sending and receiving
documents to his relationship with clients and his ability to
handle the workload. In this, he illuminates the ways in
which accessibility, as tied to technology, has slowly but
surely become integral to what is bought and sold in the
economic exchange of legal service.
The advent of email was a big deal, but it was
constrained by what you could accomplish with it. It
wasn’t until you had the ability to attach documents of
any given size - that fundamentally changed
everything. With FedEx you at least had 24-hour
notice that you had this wagonload of documents
coming in and you could kind of plan for it. With
email, now, they send them [documents] immediately,
and they expect immediate attention. And so, the
mindset is that somehow you are going to be able to
put down whatever you’re doing and bring the
resources to bear to do the proper analysis of those
documents in a fairly rapid period of time. … And the
client knows that you’ve seen them, or you should be
able to see them, so that you don’t have any excuse to
say, well, I didn’t see them until Monday.
David, a junior partner in the same law firm tells a similar
story. Describing how Sunday FedEx delivery “bums me
out” David recalls,
No I remember exactly when that happened, like ’97
or ’98, when FedEx started delivering on Saturday,
and now Sunday. And people recognized, ok, this is as
big of a thing as faxes. Like ten or 15 years before
that, when faxes came, and all of a sudden, you could
get something immediately. And then FedEx on
weekends and now you have these [holds up
smartphone], there’s absolutely no dead time.
The ways in which these service professionals recall
FedEx’s temporal creep to weekend delivery and the
advent of mobile and ubiquitous email suggests that
expectations of total availability are constrained only by
infrastructural/technical capacity. To highlight how these
temporal work conditions may have become the
normative commercial product they now appear to be,
we contrast these elite service professionals with
professionals in a set of industries where total
availability is, as of yet, less the norm .
Introducing availability
Across the board, investment bankers, management
consultants, and corporate attorneys not only associated
availability with client service, but they took this
association for granted. A conversation with a vice
president in a hotel management company, Chad, suggests,
however, that this association is neither fixed nor inevitable.
Chad’s company has recently begun to expand their
business. They are hoping to attract new hotel owners and
are actively bidding against other firms in the area to
manage privately owned hotels. Asked about his
smartphone, Chad relates how accessibility figures into his
relationship with a new client, the owner of the hotel. Chad
first states that the best thing about his smartphone is,
“really the accessibility, and just being available at any
given time.” Probed as to why this is good, Chad describes,
You know we have that whole focus on work life
balance? And, while we do mean it, we’re the biggest
violators. We say it, but if there was anything in our
culture that’s a little, difficult, well, that’s the toughie.
If accessibility is our competitive edge, well, that’s it,
that’s what we have to do.
Later in the interview he reveals some regret about, or at
least awareness of, the world he has helped create. Asked
the biggest drawback of carrying a smartphone he admits,
The biggest drawback is, we’ve spoiled the people that
we work with, as well as we work for. There is that
expectation.
Integral to the strategy of availability that Chad describes is
an assumption that hotel owners “appreciate” (and
eventually “expect”) employees to be available 24/7.
I would say it’s good because you’re in a serviceoriented industry. So, you’re providing a service …
and owners, well they’re appreciative of that.
Our conversations with sales representatives from a major
footwear manufacturer provide additional insight into how
the communication practices of customers affect individual
experience of availability. Each sales representative in this
firm services a particular type of customer -- some are in
charge of independent mom and pop shoe stores, others
major department stores. Thus, the structure of the buying
system of one’s customers affects the degree to which any
one sales representative feels compelled to be available to
clients. Sales representatives themselves are conscious of
the discrepancies between accounts. For example, in 2007
Tabitha is adamant that carrying a smartphone does not
affect her relationship to the small stores she services,
Chad goes on to suggest that selling availability can be an
active decision, a strategic move in a competitive market
where such expectations are not currently the norm. Asked
if owners expect constant accessibility he acknowledges,
No, no. See, the nature of my accounts, being
independent based, a lot of them don't even have, say,
computerized systems in their stores. So, for them to
be on email? Its just not gonna happen.
Now they do. Which is somewhat new. It is interesting,
because that third party owner on the East Coast, the
first thing they said when they started working with us
was, “Man, you guys are available 24/7.” That’s
unlike Jacobson, which is another big management
company, or National, or whomever. And it’s just –
that’s become – that’s us. I’d call it a competitive
edge or advantage, and I think its good.
While, on the other hand, Fred, a senior account executive,
sees the communication practices of his larger department
store accounts shifting in a manner that will require more
electronically-mediated accessibility on his part,
Asked if accessibility is something that their business
development team is actively selling, he declares,
Absolutely. Yes. We’ve talked about it in terms of what
we can provide, a niche, an edge.
According to Chad, the introduction of accessibility as part
of the service they are offering hotel owners is not the
consequence of a creep in technological capacity or an
expansion of FedEx services. Rather, it is the result of a
strategic decision made by him and his colleagues—a
decision that is not without some costs. Chad admits that
the firm’s focus on work/life balance has suffered since this
focus onto cultivating new business. He reflects,
They’re becoming much, much more tied to email. It’s
easier. You know, I think, one of the things about
email that people like myself, and customers, and
people who have been raised using the phone, have
discovered, is that email gives you a much better time
flexibility. A lot of my customers have realized that the
phone ties up a lot of time, which they don’t want to
spend. So, they prefer an email that they can respond
to at their leisure, perhaps after hours, even late at
night. And so my customers definitely prefer email.
And if they prefer email than I prefer email. That’s just
the way it is.
Fred’s reflections suggest that he sees himself as
responding to, rather than initiating, shifts in expectations
of availability. However, his experience of catering to
customers suggests how, for some sales representatives,
availability is becoming incorporated into the ‘product’ of
shoe sales in much the same way as Chad envisions as the
future of hotel management.
Rationalizing availability
Once accessibility has become concomitant with the service
offered to clients, we see how service professionals begin to
associate doing their job as reflective of a temporal mode of
constant availability. In such an environment, individuals
are put in the position of incorporating availability into their
understanding of what it is to ‘be’ a certain kind of
professional and conduct business “in the 21st century.” For
example, after describing a working day that begins at 6am
and ends after 10pm, Gary, a private equity professional,
gives the following reply to the question, “Do you mind
having your day be so much longer?”
No. No. Because I signed up for that. That’s part of
the world we’re in. We don’t have beginnings and
ends to things that we do unfortunately, but that’s
been true for me for a long, long time. It’s not
anything new. It is the nature of this job.
Mike, the corporate lawyer has a similar response,
No, I actually, I’m one of those, you know, I’m a total
advocate of being tied in all the time just because
that’s the business we’re in.
Hillary, another corporate lawyer, goes beyond Mike to
assert that not only is availability part of the business, it is
her way to distinguish herself to her clients (and,
presumably, sell more business).
To me, I actually think it [having a smartphone]
increases my productivity for a couple of different
reasons. The first would be that now I don’t have any
dead time when I’m in a cab or in a car service going
to the airport, any of what normally would be, you
know, sleeping opportunities when I’m traveling. I
feel like I can use that time in a convenient way for me
because that otherwise would be totally dead time, to
make some connections with people and show them
I’m still engaged, even though I’m in Europe, I’m still
concerned with what’s happening with my tiny little
company in California. I’m still checking in so that
they can then get that, you know, from a client service
perspective they can have it in their mind. Oh my God,
Hillary’s so responsive. She’s even thinking about me
when she’s in Europe. That makes all the difference.
Bob, another partner in the law firm expresses a more
ambivalent relationship with the economic underpinnings of
availability as related to communication technologies,
You know, there are downsides, yeah. I mean the
notion of technology, in my view, is that it should
make my life more effective and efficient, not to let
other people control my life more. And in the service
business that’s the balancing act. The thing with
clients really is marketing that you’re available at any
time but I’m honestly not sure if you actually have to
available at any time. That is the trick of it.
Bob’s insights provoke the question: given the economic
necessity of maintaining the appearance of total
availability, how can any one individual employee
wrestle back control of their time and connectivity? Our
research suggests that individuals, even those at the
highest level of the firm, are severely constrained in their
ability to limit availability. We thus suggest that a more
fruitful way to address Bob’s “trick of it” involves
providing support to teams and organizations.
DISCUSSION
These data make it clear that one of the major factors
contributing to temporal work conditions is today’s
prevailing economic value on total availability -- a
condition that people in many professional service
occupations already appear to take for granted. In this
competitive marketplace, client service has become
synonymous with availability.. Our data also suggest that
this orientation toward customer service is moving beyond
elite industries such as law and management consulting and
finding its way into domains such as hotel management and
shoe sales, where is it actively being normatively
rationalized.
This emergence of a ‘total availability best practice’
suggests a future where more and more employees have
diminishing structural power over their temporal work
conditions. In the United States at least, where organized
labor efforts have decreased steadily over the last decades,
this leaves the modern day knowledge worker, his or her
teammates and fellow employees—even their bosses—in a
professional pressure cooker with little ammunition to turn
the prevailing tide toward constant connectivity to the
workplace. Firms are increasingly, if not compulsorily,
offering total availability of their employees to clients and
customers. Employees must accept the terms of this bargain
and learn to live with the burdens of constant connectivity
in order to achieve professional success.
As this last comment reflects, the burden of total
availability generally falls on the individual. Current design
interventions that attempt to alleviate experiences of
disruption, overwork, and negative temporal work patterns
tend to align with this perspective. Design efforts in the
CHI/CSCW community have largely focused on how
individuals manage, and occasionally restrict, their own
accessibility. This has led to the development of innovative
applications and technologies that aid in the ongoing “wars”
against our email inboxes, our blurred home and work
boundaries, and our daily experience of professional
interruption and dislocation (e.g., [2, 23, 29, 30, 34, 58]).
However, because such work tends to focus on individuallevel interventions for alleviating stress and managing
availability, these tactics cannot fully address the
underlying structural and economic drivers that exacerbate
problems related to temporal work conditions. Aside from
changing the structure of the market or exiting the
workplace, we suggest that individuals are generally not in
a position to substantively affect the degree to which they
are enrolled in markets of availability.
Recent scholarship in management studies provides insight
into an alternative logic for managing availability, one that
looks to the collective, not the individual, level of practice
within an organization to address the problem of total
availability. Studying an organizational change effort aimed
at providing elite consultants predictable time disconnected
from work, Leslie Perlow and colleagues [42, 52, 53]
outline how a collective strategy of managing temporal
work conditions can enable teams to maintain the client
expectation of 24/7 availability while carving out individual
time off for each individual. Conducting Predictable Time
Off (PTO) experiments, Perlow shows how collective
strategies that enabled each team member to take one night
“off” a week inspired teams to reorient to their work and
each other in productive and positive ways. Perlow’s
research shows that intervention strategies aimed at the
collective level have simultaneous outward and inward
effects: they enable the organization to maintain an outward
relationship of total availability and develop structural
internal strategies to manage employees’ time.
Notably, one of the cornerstones of the collective strategy
outlined in Perlow’s study is the fact that the client was not
told that consultants were taking time off. In other words,
the change effort was based on the assumption that the
organization could successfully manage the impression that
they were a fully available service provider while operating
behind the scenes in a different, less-than-totally-available
manner. In fact, early on in the experiment it was agreed
that the organization would end the experiment if it
appeared that work was suffering or the client was
displeased in any way with the service provided. The fact
that they never had to revert back to traditional temporal
practices speaks to the organization’s ability to manage
their impression of availability successfully.
In addition to being a collective solution, Perlow’s case is a
interesting example Goffman’s impression management
tactics [22], albeit at the organizational level. Originally
conceived to explain individual behavior, Goffman’s ideas
about impression management contend that people work to
maintain their social identity and establish certain
expectations about their actions. Goffman suggested that
managing impressions is akin to putting on a play: the
audience is privy to the activities on the front stage, a feat
that is often accomplished through collaboration with
‘stagehands’ back stage. The success of the front stage is
dependent on that of the back; yet, if the backstage
workings are revealed, the performance is also ruined. Front
stage and back stage, though occurring in interdependent
simultaneity, must be kept separate from one another to
achieve the proper effect of either.
Perlow’s consultants, for example, were successful in their
front stage performance because they separated the need to
please the client from the necessity of coordinating back
stage work. This was a collective achievement.
Successfully managing the impression of total availability
at the organizational level requires a coordinated effort
among employees: it is impossible to pull off a successful
performance with actors acting according to different
scripts. The management strategy deployed by Perlow’s
subjects involved a backstage set of activities that revolved
around rotating days off among employees. To achieve this
performance, consultants organized their work around a
clear goal (one night off a week) and took part in regular
meetings focused on ensuring that client services did not
suffer (calendar exercise, pulse check, etc.).1 This
coordinated stage work was accomplished primarily
through structured dialogue. Successful as this method was,
we believe that alternative or augmentative sociotechnical
solutions could be designed to support collective
organizational performances of total availability. We bring
this challenge to the CHI/CSCW community.
Designing for Collective Impression Management
Addressing the phenomenon of total availability is a design
challenge related to a lineage of CHI-related research aimed
at addressing modern work conditions such as interruptions,
email overload, and other forms of technostress [2, 25, 27,
37-40, 51, 63, 65]. We hope our work herein will inspire
designers to take into account previously overlooked
economic aspects of this issue and look anew at issues of
availability, constant connectivity and temporal work
practices. By revealing the way that total accessibility can
subvert individual agency our perspective directly
challenges assumptions central to the classic vision of
ubiquitous computing - that providing anytime/anywhere
access to digital information is normatively positive..
Recognizing
how
industry
is
capitalizing
on
technologically-facilitated availably, and rendering this
capacity part of economic exchange, provides direction and
theoretical traction to recent calls in the HCI community to
look beyond these anytime/anywhere assumptions in
designing mobile and ubiquitous tools and services [14, 15].
More specifically, we suggest that viable design solutions
addressing total availability should 1) acknowledge the
economic underpinnings of contemporary work practices,
and 2) enable collective, coordinated action related to time
management. The contribution of using Goffman’s
dramaturgical metaphor for design thinking, for example, is
that it suggests ways to assess an organization from
multiple angles (i.e., client-facing, colleague facing)
simultaneously. This frame inspires questions like the
following: What would it look like to design a collaborative
1
See Perlow’s recent book, “Sleeping with Your Smartphone: How to
Break the 24/7 Habit and Change the Way You Work.” for more detail on
the process.
systems and/or social network tool that might aid in
signaling front-stage organizational availability or provide
alternate symbolic forms of professional connection? What
knowledge do we have from past team studies, for instance,
that could help us develop a way for colleagues to selfmanage their collective temporal access back stage? What
middleware is needed to tie these two sociotechnical
components together seamlessly? Unfortunately, no pithy
solution can be provided herein – nor should one be so easy
to conceive - but we trust that this topic like recent forays
into complex topics such as crowd forms of work and
environmental informatics will generate creative thinking in
years to come.
CONCLUSION
This paper introduced the overlooked factor of economic
exchange to explain the current phenomenon of constant
connectivity and intense work practices that are prevalent in
knowledge and service work. Using interview data from
four research studies of communication practices in the
workplace, we illustrate how 24/7 availability has become
an integral aspect of the service provided to clients and
customers in a variety of service professions. This factor is
unexplored in current explanations of technostress drawn
from cultural, technical, social and psychological theories.
Thus, while the array of perspectives on information
technology, stress, and work relations each help elucidate
why contemporary workplaces have become sites of
unsustainable temporal relations, they fail to fully explain
the origins of worker’s experiences. As such, prior work is
unable to inspire actionable design interventions that into
account the economic and collective underpinnings of
constant connectivity.
In hopes of inspiring the HCI design community to move in
new directions, we provide avenues for reflective design
[60] around the economic underpinnings of constant
connectivity. Embracing economic perspectives into visions
of mobile computing suggests new criteria, assumptions,
and trajectories for design. One conceivable direction is
toward design that facilitates collective management around
expectations of availability and access to individual time.
As such, we encourage this community to begin
experimenting with designs that conceptually cleave
organizations in new ways, looking both outward to how an
organization must contend with external clients and
customers as much as inward to understand its role in
facilitating the work of individuals, teams and departments.
Along these lines, we welcome increased dialogue that
strives to situate design interventions within their macrosocial contexts, such as we have done by highlighting the
emergency of industry level norms valuing total employee
availability. Thus, this paper aligns with recent calls in HCI
that stress the importance of adopting a macro perspective
in tandem with more micro-and meso-level perspectives in
order to appropriately investigate the pressures facing
organizations and understand the broader implications of
our designs.
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