Managerial Control of Employees Working at Home Alan Felstead, Nick Jewson, and Sally Walters Abstract Places of work constitute processes of management by facilitating ‘visibility’ (the possibility for supervisors and others to observe workers) and ‘presence’ (the ability for workers to participate in relations with co-workers and others). Working at home creates problems for both these aspects of managerial control. We suggest that managers seek to compensate for the relative lack of visibility and presence of home-located workers by generating a range of devices and social disciplines that together comprise loose networks of control. However, these responses are only partially successful since they are founded on contra- dictory assumptions and practices. 1. Introduction This paper explores the implications of home-located working for processes of managerial control. It draws on data from 202 qualitative in-depth inter- views with managers and employees located in 13 case-study organizations. In particular, it focuses on issues surrounding the visibility (by which we mean the possibility of being observed by supervisors and others) and presence (meaning the ability to participate in social relations with co-workers and others) of white-collar and professional/managerial employees who work at home. Three research questions are addressed. First, in what ways does home- located working create problems for conventional strategies of managerial control that focus on the visibility and presence of workers? Second, what techniques and strategies do managers deploy in addressing the challenges of supervising home-located workers with relatively low levels of visibility and presence? Third, what difficulties and contradictions do managers face in rec- onciling the various strategies they adopt in addressing the relative lack of visibility and presence of home-located workers? For many years, working at home was regarded as the province of highly exploited female manual workers in particular trades (Allen and Wolkowitz British Journal of Industrial Relations 41:2 June 2003 0007–1080 pp. 241–264 The authors are at the Centre for Labour Market Studies, University of Leicester. © Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2003. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.