Research: The Work Front

People who live blended lifestyles in rural areas either need to be their own bosses, or to have very flexible bosses, or to work nearby.

My employer is very flexible. What does the rest of the picture look like?

1. Between 1997 and 2001, the proportion of people teleworking rose by over 65%, to 2.2 million people. (Matheson, J. and Summerfield, C. (Eds). Social Trends No 31. ONS 2001, p82-83)

2. That kind of freedom is still a privilege rather than the norm, and tends to be enjoyed by graduate and professional knowledge workers. In the US, where teleworkers’ mean income is 66% higher than the national average, 12.5% of the workforce telework. 40% say they would like to but don’t think that their employers would allow it.

(Bennian, Y. and Dwelly, T. (2003) Time to Go Home London: The Work Foundation)

3. Researchers have identified five types of mobile workers, including Yo-yos who occasionally work away from a fixed work location; Pendulums who work alternately at two locations – say, the rural home and the urban office; and Nomads who work at changing locations.

(Lilischkis, S. (2003) ‘More Yo-yos, Pendulums and Nomads: Trends of mobile and multi-location work in the information society’, in Socio-Economic Trends Assessment for the Digital Revolution, p7.)

4. "Organisational cultures are shifting. The bureaucratic, hierarchical structures of old, in which management would impose control over not only what workers do but how, when and where, are beginning to dissolve. Networked organisational structures are growing up in their place, with increasingly flexible relationships between employers and employees hinged by mutual trust. One product of this shift is that more employees are exercising greater autonomy over where they work – and in many cases it is broadband that enables them to seize this freedom."  John Craig and I in Beyond Digital Divides, Demos and the Countryside Agency, 2004.

5. "Employees want more human organisations with greater autonomy and flexibility… In short, they want organisations to ‘disorganise.’" - Miller, P. and Skidmore, P. (2004) Disorganisation: Why future organisations must ‘loosen up.’  London: Demos

6. Since it's launch in 2005, The Hub - a shared office space for come-and-go workers and organisations - has been a phenomenal success, and there are now 18 around the world - just four years since the first one opened.

I reckon there are a lot of jobs where you need to go to the office for group meetings, and that that needs to happen no more than once or maybe twice a week. That's been the case in all the work I've ever done, apart from site specific work like waitressing and babysitting when I was younger. 

In between the office contact, for two or three way communication, skype, the phone, and other kinds of electronic comms work just fine.

This works where there's trust and commitment going two ways.

Call me an extremist, but I'd say, if there's not trust and commitment, why bother?

Lots of managers think their employees have to be in the office all the time so that they can be controlled. And I think, if you have to control people to get work out of them, that's shit. If the work doesn't come voluntarily, there's something fundamentally wrong. The situation is saying something to you.

Like, if you're a plastic cup factory, and your office staff have to work in the office otherwise they'd be at home just pretending to work, that says, the staff don't love the organisation and what it is here in the world to do.

And I think, if an organisation's staff don't love the organisation and what it is here in the world to do, then maybe the organisation doesn't have a right to exist.

Maybe if everybody working in organisations doing and producing things that they didn't love just stopped, you'd only be left with the organisations doing things that were really worth doing.

I've observed a 'fewer, better' principle at play in my life. Gradually, I start wanting fewer, better clothes; fewer, better friends. Maybe the world needs fewer, better organisations.

I know in the interim there'd be a hell of a lot of chaos

but there's a fair amount of chaos around right now

maybe it's time to start

ok, fewer sounds like The Day of the Multinationals but you know what I mean. If no-one loves plastic cup companies, let them die. We'll figure out something better.

Here's what they do in India instead of plastic cups.

When they're done they throw them on the ground and they smash and gradually get stomped back into the earth and it's the same earth that new cups are made from so it's like life, zero waste, works just fine.

The Research: People Like Me

Ok here's my first stab.

On people, in no particular order


1.  4 out of 10 UK adults under 35 dream of 'downshifting', according to research from the Prudential 


2.  While 75% of Brits live in urban and suburban areas, 54% say that they would rather live in the countryside or a village, and 72% think that they would be happier anywhere but a city, according to a Gallup survey reported in The Economist


3.  This isn't a new trend: even in 1939, 61% of people wanted to move to rural areas – yet at that time, national migration flows ran the other way  (same Economist article)


4.  So, young wealthy urban folk are on the move. Research has found that urban to rural migration outstrips North to South migration at a rate of 4:1; in one study, 48% of urban to rural migrants were under 40, and in another, 50% were aged 25-44. One study found that 41% of incomers earned over £25k a year, compared with 13% of locals, and 70% of incomers were economically active. 


These figures are all reported in a report I wrote with Demos for the Countryside Agency back in 2004, called Beyond Digital Divides, and come from Mason, John, ‘Is there really a rural economy? Urban concerns crowd in on the countryside’ Financial Times, 18 September, 2004, and Findlay, A and Stockdale, E.(2003) Rural In-Migration: A Catalyst for Economic Regeneration, Draft report.



So are the migrants living the Good Life or shopping at Tescos? What do they want to be doing? Don't know. Do know this, however:


5. In 2006 the BBC reported that allotment waiting lists in Camden were ten years long. ("Forget the flat caps, allotments are becoming fashionable among inner-city eco-warriors.") In 2009 the Telegraph  reported that Camden's waiting lists were now 40 years long, with many other parts of the country at the 10 year point, and a total of 100,000 Brits on waiting lists for allotments. It's the recession + Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall + Jamie Oliver that've done it, writes the journalist.


6. Everyone I speak to seems to share this yearning.


7.  Last friday I went to an Alastair McIntosh talk down in Brighton. (In Soil and Soul , Alastair points out that we partly left the land in the first place because we wanted to, but a lot of the migration was driven by the sword.. Enclosures etc.). 

It was friday evening. Train from London after a long day of work. (Four hour meeting in chairs, bodies slouched, energies kept up with tea and snacks, sunshine outside, walls around us. We should have had that meeting over a veg patch somewhere... But where?)  

The city in my body. I sat. Alastair opened a slide of his home Island of Lewis and the woman behind me had exactly the same reaction as me in exactly the same moment, at the sight of all that wild green expanse; a sharp, instinctive inhalation, followed by a long slow out breath accompanied in my case at least by a relaxing of the body and a little wetting of the eyes.

This yearning is beyond ideas, for me. It is in my fibres, perhaps it is in that woman's fibers too, perhaps it is in all of our fibres.

Everyone I speak to seems to yearn for this kind of thing. It might be because I mainly speak to people who are more or less like me. It's also possible that it's because this is about something fundamental to the human animal.

Call for Research

Hello.

According to my stat counter, about ten different people visit this blog each day.

I have a question.

You might have leads. 

Do you?

Ok so here are my questions. (they've just multiplied).

1. Who else wants to live the way that I want to live? With part time knowledge work, and gardening, and goats, and a slower pace of life, and rural air and space and breakfasting on the hedgerows? 

Who are they? What do they number? What sorts of people are they?


2. Who is able to live that way?

I've got 50% of the blended lifestyle: a part time interesting job that I can do from anywhere provided I can be in London for meetings about once a week. That gives me the time and flexibility to establish the other 50% of the blended lifestyle.

How normal is that kind of work? How many people can have such freedom and flexibility with their employers?


3. What are the relevant social, economic and environmental trends?

And what are the drivers? And, how might they play out over the next couple of decades?


If you know anything, any stats, or any articles or reports that would be good to read, could you drop a comment or an email??