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NEW ORGANIZATIONAL FORMS THAT SUPPORT KNOWLEDGE WORK 63

suggest that they are still around and working! Given this ‘game’, what would
be the point of working long hours from home where no one could see the
effort that was put in?
Many managers, then, do not appear to trust their employees to work at
home fearing that if they are not visible they will exert less effort. At the same
time, workers are reluctant to work from home, because they fear that this will
reduce their visibility and therefore their potential for promotion. From the
institutional perspective, then, teleworking, at least as a substitute for work-
ing ‘at the office’, will only become more widespread when these deep-seated
attitudes and cultural norms change, regardless of any advances in ICTs which
can support teleworking, and the obvious benefits of such an arrangement.
From an agency perspective, knowledge workers may not take advantage of
teleworking if they perceive that this gives them less opportunity to make a
good impression with their boss.
Having said this, another trend that is today ‘visible’ for knowledge workers
can mean working from home, after having spent a long day at the office! Thus,
we have seen already how the advent of blackberry and other handheld mobile
devices can encourage a 24/7 mentality in some contexts, which means indi-
viduals are actually expected to be and expect to be available for work, anytime
and anyplace, even when on holiday. In doing this, some workers may well be
conforming to the ‘presentism’ culture even whilst not physically at the office –
sending e-mails to the boss at 3 a.m. in the morning, for example, can be a
tactical ploy to illustrate commitment rather than a response to flexible work
opportunities from home. Nevertheless, being available 24/7 arguably makes
knowledge workers less, rather than more, free. This led Donnelly (2006, p. 95)
to conclude,
Many knowledge workers are likely to remain ‘enslaved’, like traditional employees, as
their temporal/ locational flexibility is restricted by the needs of their employer(s), cli-
ent demands and expectations, ‘professionalism’, network relations and career ambi-
tions. As a result, claims that knowledge workers remain ‘free workers’, may involve
greater rhetoric than reality.

>> NEW ORGANIZATIONAL FORMS AND ICTS

As seen above, developments in ICTs provide opportunities for new forms of
knowledge work. They also open up new possibilities for organizational designs
more generally. In particular, ICTs may enable the creation of organizational
designs that provide more supportive environments for work that is knowledge-
intensive. As has already been suggested in Chapter 2, knowledge work is best
conducted in ‘organic’ and informal settings, with egalitarian cultures and where
horizontal, as opposed to vertical, communication dominates. Such work set-
tings are very different to the traditional bureaucratic ‘top-down’ forms of
organization advocated by Scientific Management (and outlined in Chapter 1).
Bureaucratic organizational forms certainly continue to exist, but it is evident

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