The Sustainability Quandary

Incomplete Working draft of 2 March

1. Preamble - Understanding the Future - The Choices
2. There are of course many different ways of looking at and trying to understand the likely course of future events, and in matters as far reaching in their importance as public policy and business decisions in a sector like 'telework' it is critical to make the right choice. Basically we have three broad choices as we try to get a handle on future events: (a) future visions that are more or less closely tied to trend data, (b) ones based more on subjective judgement, and (c) finally speculative visions of possibilities.
3. We can note that there is considerable stress given to the collection and analysis of 'sound data' as a prerequisite to understanding both what is going on and what is going to happen in the sector.
4. There is thus a drive to have 'respectable scientific evidence' - in order to be properly knowledgeable in all these respects
5. Problem: We are talking about a major trend break here
6. Moreover, a break which is at present only starting to make itself felt
7. Most of its future is still very much ahead of it
8. All of which renders the analysis of information taken from the past - even the very recent past - quite meaningless.
   
9. This of course is an complete anomaly, more or less directly analogous to the situation of the drunk who insists on searching for his keys over here where there happens to be some light, despite the fact that he actually lost them way over there where it is pitch black.
   
10. Which suggest to me that if we are going to think cogently about the future of telework, we are going to need to rely on some rather different analytical models.
    
11. It may be that the approaches which I believe to be more useful in this context will be ones to which many in our meeting will give little value - because they are highly judgmental, quite intuitive and most definitely at best more ordinal than cardinal - if it's numbers you want.
    
12. Fortunately however, this situation does not leave us bereft of good ideas and useful information about what is going on at present and what might occur - or even more important in our present context, helped to occur - in the future.
    
13. Telework is not Telecommuting - And that is not a trivial distinction
14. But doubtless the worse single way of all of thinking about the future of what we are calling 'telework' is to take as your point of departure the old 'telecommuting' model (i.e., office work performed over modems, etc. in the home instead of in the main office).
15. However, if you look at most of the reports on the subject - especially those that suggest that not much of any far-reaching importance is going on -- you can observe that this is the basic model they invariably have in mind.
16. The great problem with this is that it gives us a far too narrow vision of our topic.
17. And the great problem with that is that from the vantage of the important public policy issues that all this brings up what this approach gives us is a bit of the tail, but almost nothing else of the dog that wags it. We really need to have a good look at the whole dog.
18. But when most observers ask 'how many people are teleworking today' and like questions, this is more or less the mental model they have in mind.
19. The problem is, in fact, that our word, telework, is a bit of a misnomer - but what is worse that it focuses our attention on the wrong things.
20. The question that one should be asking in its stead takes a different point of departure - namely the 'dislocation' (in space yes, but also in time, task structure, institutions, individual and family lives, communities, and many other things) of 'old ways of work' by new ways which are being radically defined by telecommunications and information technologies more broadly.
21. Put in other words what we really should be focusing on here is the impact of the 'Information Society' (for lack of a better phrase) on our ways of work, ways of life and of course on the environment.
22. Conflicting Claims and Confusion:
23. If you wish to know how many people are teleworkers these days you will have little difficulty in finding people who are ready to answer your question.
24. What is most interesting and instructive about what they have to say is how very far apart the various estimates are. That in itself already tells us a lot about the level of 'maturity' of the analysis that is going on.
25. Typical answers to the how many teleworkers question - sticking to our advanced economies for the time being - range anywhere from 1% to as high as 15% of the labor force of the region under study.
26. Where these is more agreement - though still with extreme variations - is on the matter of the tempo of growth (I prefer the concept of tempo and all that it conveys of human metrics to the more mechanistic concept of 'rate of growth'. Here the brunt of the consensus is that no matter how many teleworkers there might be out there today, the overall thrust is to steady increases in the number of people doing it.

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