14. The Pressures of Commitment: Taking Software Home

The current era has seen a number of academic and policy debates over the claimed increase in the porosity of the boundary between the work and domestic spheres of social activity (Baldry et al., 2007; Houston, 2005; Warhurst et al., 2008). The causes of this have been identified variously as the shift to more “flexible” forms of employment (Department of Trade and Industry, 2004), an increasing rate of female participation in the labour market with consequent demands on child-care resources (Cousins and Tang, 2004; Crompton, 2002), the intensification and extensification of the labour process in time of heightened competition (Cousins and Tang, 2004) or economic crisis and the enabling qualities of IT which have made possible an increase in both mobile work (Hislop and Axtell, 2009) and teleworking at home (Haddon and Brynin, 2005).