The Fault Lines of Internet-enabled Work in Rural Atlantic Canada: Putting Gender and Class in Place.

Abstract

Forms of internet-enabled work, telework, and digital work, are often imagined and promoted to allow "work from anywhere," and that place is no longer relevant; but this study of internet-enabled work in rural Atlantic Canada shows that geographical place and individuals' relationship to it matter in terms of why rural workers are involved, how they access opportunities, and the impacts on their work and households. Twenty-eight participants from rural communities completed a questionnaire and participated in semi-structured interviews. I apply a grounded theory approach to the analysis and employ an inductive process, staying close to the data to develop findings grounded in time and place. The findings reveal that the length of time in rural communities impacts involvement, as residents with skills and experiences gained in urban areas are involved at a higher rate and can gain access to opportunities far from their communities without incurring material or labour costs over long-term residents. Rural women are more involved than rural men because of interrelated mechanisms of occupational segregation, spatial division of labour, and rural work cultures. Rural women are also pushed into the forms of work as a strategy to overcome material conditions and rural employment contexts. A portion of rural women are also actively engaging in internet-enabled work in addition to other paid forms of work, which puts them in a situation where the spheres of work and home are acute, as they must manage the conflicts between employers in addition to their domestic work and other care responsibilities. Rural women with children and long-term rural women are disadvantaged in enacting strategies to minimize negative impacts. The thesis fills a gap as it focuses on rural contexts rather than the urban environments that dominate the literature. It also furthers scholarship initiated by scholars on the gendering of rural digital work