Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore what it means to be a manager in the context of working from home, or “flexworking”, as an increasingly common work practice. Design/methodology/approach The paper is located within an interpretive interactionist perspective, drawing on interviews with managers who took part in a larger qualitative study of employees who work from home two or more days a week in the Canadian subsidiary of a high‐tech MNC. Template analysis identified themes which are most salient in managers” experiences of managing these “flexworkers”. Findings The findings point to several key themes in interviewees' experiences of managing flexworkers: maintaining a balance between providing autonomy alongside appropriate levels of cohesion between themselves and employees and between employees; the increasing importance of trust and the centrality of interpersonal relationships and interactions. Research limitations/implications A limitation is a relatively small sample size (27) in the Canadian hi‐tech industry. Also, the findings may not be applicable to other industries or to managers in other countries. The paper's location within an interpretive interactionist framework accords primary focus to individual action rather than structural forces. Practical implications Contemporary management development initiatives should balance communication and support, while avoiding micromanagement. They should also develop managers' ability to ensure that social bonds are maintained but do not undermine the principles of flexwork. Originality/value There is a paucity of qualitative research on flexworking in Canada. Moreover, the paper contributes a theoretical understanding of this work arrangement, whereas previous research has been primarily descriptive.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".