Sally is president of BT Ignite (a major division of BT) who is one of a new breed of workers, managing large teams and projects through extensive use of communication technology. While Sally still spends some time in the office, she also works from home, on planes, trains and taxis, and even at the hairdressers. Her teams are so-called virtual teams - not location based but spread out over several countries. They also embrace new working lifestyles.

From a business perspective, applying new technology to old processes can bring massive benefits. Steve Apted of catering company Whitbread uses software to buy food for their restaurants via an online auction. What used to take months of negotiations can now be completed on the internet in a matter of hours.

Sally believes she wouldn’t be working if it weren’t for this communication technology based flexible approach to work. She has a family she’s committed to, including a young daughter. By using laptops, mobile phones, and other gadgets she is able to work from home at least one day a week and aims to get home for 6 in the evening - returning to her work in her ‘home office’ after her daughter is in bed. However, as Sally’s daughter highlights, a holiday doesn’t necessarily mean that Sally is away from work.

For many people, new technologies have made a world of difference to how they live, work and enjoy themselves. Innovations are enabling new patterns of work and may also contribute to how we manage our everyday public and private lives.

What this means is that how we act out our everyday lives - in terms of how we do our job, or how we meet the demands of family life, for instance - is to some extent likely to have accommodated ICTs. At the far end of this spectrum is the ‘cyberboss’.

For social scientists, the evidence for this apparently new kind of worker comes in a number of different forms:

First, there are people, like Sally Davis who was featured in the programme, who identify themselves as ‘cyberbosses’.

Secondly, Sally’s work may well be qualitatively different from the work of other heads of corporations - and this is something we could compare by looking at other bosses’ patterns of work, both now and in the past - that suggests it isn’t just Sally’s perception that things are different.

Finally, we could look at the relationships Sally has with other workers and her family to see if their current patterns are dependent on the technology she uses - and which, in her opinion, define her as a cyberboss.

So, what is a cyberboss?

To some extent this is a straightforward question with a straightforward answer: a cyberboss is someone who manages a workforce with little face-to-face contact and who uses ICTs as an important strategy in completing their day-to-day tasks. But there is more to it than this, being a ‘cyberboss’ doesn’t just mean that you use a mobile phone to arrange meetings, or that email is the prime means by which you discuss work with your employees. It also means that these technologies are integrated into the rest of your life as well.

A cyberboss, unlike an office-based boss, is ‘in’, by virtue of being online, 24 hours a day. And, unlike an office-based based boss, who leaves the office to go home, or go on holiday, wheresoever the cyberboss may be is potentially ‘the office’: the office is wherever there is a phone or an internet connection.

For Sally Davis, this accessibility is sometimes an advantage; she can email her employees at 8 o’clock at night and expects to reach them. But, as her daughter points out a ‘holiday’ is not really a holiday, it is often just a different place where Mummy brings her computer and works.

So, while ICTs may provide some freedom within her public life - Sally can travel where she needs to and yet is always on hand - they may also intrude upon her private life - holidays cease being holidays.

Thinking about this in a slightly different way, we might start to ask whether there is increasing evidence of an erosion of the boundary between what we might think of as our ‘public’ life and our ‘private’ life. Looking at Sally’s day, even a trip to the hairdressers is filled with time online, rather than the conventional chat about holiday plans.

But what about Steve Apted? His latest brush with new technology, it seems, is part of a programme to reduce his workload - and to decrease the time he has to spend travelling. If he doesn’t approach and negotiate with, say, half a dozen suppliers, on an individual, face-to-face, basis then, as he points out, the process of choosing a supplier, that might ‘have taken weeks or months’, can now be resolved in ‘an hour’. There is, however, more to this scenario as well.

Ultimately, what Steve is interested in is the lowest bid: ‘the lowest bid wins’. This means that his suppliers could come from almost anywhere. The ‘most traditional of British fare’ that Steve buys for Whitbread might be produced anywhere in the EU, or even further afield.

The cheap chips that Steve can now access because of new technology may mean that local chip makers will lose out, or they will have to match or beat the prices that Steve can get at his online auction. This, in turn, could mean the restructuring of local chip production and this may have an impact on jobs.

Of course, all this is mere hypothesis. A social scientist would be interested in finding out the extent to which these kinds of changes have occurred. Put another way, a social scientist might be interested in quantifying the extent to which some groups are winners and others losers in the ‘Information Society’.

The creation of the cyberboss may well have an impact on others. The emergence of a new kind of work practice, it seems, could lead to changing patterns of work for others across a wide spectrum of employment.

But where is the real evidence?

We can’t expect a five-minute film to give us any answers, but it is a good starting point for questions, and these questions can lead to deeper investigations. The producers of Cyberboss sought to outline some of the changes that have occurred in people’s everyday, working lives, and how new information and communication technology has played a role in those changes. They looked at two case studies of individuals (and their organisations) for whom ICTs seem to have quite dramatically changed conventional practice.

But if we really wanted evidence for these changes, across whole societies not just individuals, we would need to develop, for example, statistics on changing travel patterns, frequency of use of the Internet and phone and whether certain categories of worker worked increasingly from home. These are not easy things to ascertain, but social science surveys, questionnaires and observations may allow insights into how different people experience the ‘Information Society’.”

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Content last updated: 05/05/2005