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DEFININGTELECOMMUTING ANDTELEWORK 437contrast to the predominantly favorable current public-
ity on the topic of virtual work and virtual social rela-
tionships, however, Forster’s vision is of an anti-utopian
way of life, isolated from other people and the external
world.
Although not central to the story as inThe Machine
Stops,communications technologies that are similar to
ones now used for telecommuting are also mentioned in
H. G. Wells’ science fiction novel,When the Sleeper Wakes
(Wells, 1899). In this novel, a man falls asleep around
1900, awakens 200 years later, and becomes a messianic
figure in this new environment in which more advanced
technologies are available.
Norbert Wiener, who coined the word “cybernetics,”
touched briefly on the technologies of telecommuting in a
book published in the middle of the 20th century (Wiener,
1950). He suggested that an architect in Europe could su-
pervise the construction of a building in the United States,
using the “Ultrafax” to send drawings to the United States
and photographs of the building under construction back
to Europe. The architect could also use the telephone and
teletype for other communications regarding the project.
In the following decade, Frederick Memmott, a New
York state transportation analyst, published a serious
conceptual discussion of the benefits of telecommuting.
He noted that the transfer of information was the cause
of much urban transport activity and therefore could
be handled instead by information and communications
technologies of that period (telephone, closed-circuit tele-
vision, and radio). He stated that the primary function
of a business executive is communication and expressed
his view that executives therefore could use these tech-
nologies to handle all of their responsibilities from their
homes or other locations relatively close to their homes
(Memmott, 1963).
The late 1960s and 1970s spawned additional research
and discussion of telecommuting and related activities.
Harkness (1973) completed a Ph.D. dissertation on the
topic of communications-enabled decentralization of of-
fice space in urban centers. Several universities imple-
mented distance-learning programs using closed-circuit
television and telephone links to students in off-site loca-
tions. Hospitals in the Boston area used high-resolution
television equipment, including close-up lenses, for med-
ical consultations or “telemedicine.”
The Telecommunications-Transportation Tradeoff
(Nilles, Carlson, Gray, & Hanneman, 1976) published
the results of government-funded research into possible
solutions to the “energy crisis” of the early 1970s. It
included a detailed analyses of the feasibility, costs,
benefits, human relations factors, and so forth of using
telecommunications to relocate insurance processing
employees from high-cost, downtown office space to
suburban locations and also included analyses of dis-
tance learning, telemedicine, and other implementations.
Nilles, the lead author of this book, actually coined the
wordtelecommuting.
Since then, telecommuting has been the topic of hun-
dreds of articles in both popular and academic periodi-
cals and numerous books (a search on the Amazon.com
Web site found more than 100 publications with the
wordtelecommutingin their titles or keywords in 2003).Although these publications generally don’t mention
Toffler’s predictions, which obviously are not being real-
ized, they often cite more recent analyses that are almost
as optimistic.DEFINING TELECOMMUTING
AND TELEWORK
Telecommutingis broadly applied to a range of somewhat
different activities. It is important to identify these types
of work because they have differing implications for poli-
cies and investments at both the governmental (regula-
tory and infrastructure) and organizational levels, as well
as for other stakeholders including individual employees
and the larger society. These definitions have a major im-
pact on reported statistics and trends in the number of
people who are identified as telecommuters. Very broad
definitions can lead to high estimates that can be mis-
leading if used without making distinctions among (a) the
different types of activities and (b) differing usage levels
(measured as a proportion of total working hours). Some
researchers prefer to use the wordtelework(work at a dis-
tance), which actually encompasses most of the activities
in a more precise fashion. Common usage, however, is to
stay with the word telecommuting.
Telecommuting implies substituting telecommunica-
tions technologies for physical transportation. The slogan
is “Bring the work to the worker, rather than bringing
the worker to the work.” An employee working all day at
home, rather thancommuting(usually alone in an auto-
mobile) to a work location, is the epitome of this con-
cept. The remainder of this chapter identifies this type of
telework as “classic telecommuting,” whether done an av-
erage of once a week, several days a week, or every day
(“full-time telecommuting”).
Consistent with this popular view, the seminal
research study on telework is the aforementioned
Telecommunications–Transportation Tradeoff(Nilles et al.,
1972). Much of the analysis in the book is related to de-
centralization of central city employees to suburban of-
fice locations, however, rather than having them work at
home. Telecommunications technologies enable decen-
tralized workers to access data in mainframe comput-
ers at the downtown offices, and local managers can also
communicate with their off-site superiors largely by tele-
phone. Although this kind of implementation does not
eliminate commuting between home and the office, it can
substantially reduce distances traveled. Similarly, the first
“telecommuting dissertation” (Harkness, 1973) was actu-
ally an analysis of urban planning options to decentralize
office work to nodes located outside the central business
districts of major metropolitan areas.
“Telecommuting centers” represent another example
of decentralization rather than complete substitution of
telecommunications for computing. Local communities
sponsored such centers, with the assistance of federal
transportation funding, and private businesses have also
offered them on a for-profit basis. There were approxi-
mately 30 such facilities in and around major urban ar-
eas in the state of California during the mid-1990s. They
offered space on a subsidized basis, and some large orga-
nizations rented cubicles with the idea of having different