Micro-Resistance in teleworking: Tactics and Subjectivity in Female Teleworkers

Abstract

This article explores the role of resistance as a micro-political practice in the context of female teleworkers. Drawing on a qualitative study carried out in Spain, we conceive telework as a new logic and we examine the fundamental role of resistance in the creation of meanings and subjectivity. Resistance micro-practices are analyzed following De Certeau's approach to tactics and in the context of the limitations, restrictions, problems and difficulties faced by female teleworkers when trying to reconcile the different dimensions of family, work and everyday lives. The accounts of the participants in our study reveal key tactics that ultimately denounce prevailing patriarchal and 'flexibility' work ideologies, and that allow these teleworkers to conceive (or frame alternative identity discourses around) motherhood and being a teleworker.