New ICTs', such as smartphones and tablet computers, have revolutionised work and life in the 21st Century. Crucial to this development is the detachment of work from traditional office spaces. Today's office work is often supported by Internet connections, and thus can be done from anywhere at any time. Research on detachment of work from the employer's premises actually dates back to the previous century. In the 1970s and 1980s, Jack Nilles and Allan Toffler predicted that work of the future would be relocated into or nearby employees' homes with the help of technology, called 'Telework'. Analysing technological advancements-the enabling forces of change in this contextover four decades sheds new light on this term: they have fostered the evolution of Telework in distinct stages or 'generations'. Today's various location-independent, technology-enabled new ways of working are all part of the same revolution in the interrelationship between paid work and personal life.
In the summer of 2013 Yahoo's Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Marissa Mayer, gave a public interview at the Twelfth Annual Templeton Lecture for Economic Liberty and Constitution 1 where she explained why the company decided to abandon its popular 'work from home' policy: I had heard from lots of people all over the company, who said 'Hey, the fact that our team is distributed, or the fact that we sometimes have to stop and coordinate with someone from home, causes drag. And so we said that, as a general principle. . ., we want people in the office. Mayer follows this statement later with another related point on the topic: By the way, it has also gotten taken to sort of hyperbole, in terms of, like, 'Wait! Are you not even allowed to type an e-mail when you are not in the office?'-No, obviously we all do that, we all work from home all the time. But during normal business hours, generally, we want people to be there.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.