Remote work arrangements and the interplay between control and autonomy: a longitudinal case study of mobile teleworking

Over the last decades, remote work arrangements (RWAs), such as teleworking, mobile working and virtual working, have acquired increasing relevance within the organizational landscape, in conjunction with the rise of new ICTs that enable their large- scale adoption in organizations. Although these work practices are largely intended to generate positive outcomes for organizations and their employees, these outcomes depend on the process of implementation of RWAs programs where a critical concern is represented by organizational control and supervisory practices. Embracing a post-Fordist vision, some authors (e.g. Lautsch et al., 2009; Wiensenfeld et al., 1999) predict that RWAs would led to a change in traditional organizational control mechanisms and practices, with a weakening of technocratic control and more emphasis on output control, self-control and remote workers' autonomy. To date, empirical research (e.g. Dimitrova, 2003; Taskin & Sewell, 2015) has not confirmed this (positive) change in all contexts and evidences still remain inconclusive about which changes RWAs produce on organizational control mechanisms and supervisory approaches. Contrary to mentioned work by e.g. Lautsch et al., 2009 and Wiensenfeld et al. 1999, and similarly to studies on "autonomy" (Barley & Kunda, 2004; Barker, 1993), Taskin and Sewell (2015) showed that after telework adoption both professional and nonprofessional workers perceived restrictions on their autonomy due to an intensification of technocratic control; however, they were willing to accept diminished autonomy and even contributed to reinforce socio-ideological control based on socialization practices, workplace norms (e.g. trust) and the image of the "ideal worker" (Putnam et al., 2014) constantly available to colleagues and connected to the organization (see also Mazmanian et al., 2013). Further research is needed to understand how RWAs adoption affects control and how perceptions of autonomy engender tensions to be managed across different contexts. In this regard, management literature on RWAs has privileged home-based teleworking, neglecting mobile teleworking, which "involves travel and/or spending time on customers' premises" with laptop computers and mobile phones supporting work execution (Hislop and Axtell, 2007), as well as new flexible and virtual work practices where the integration of ICTs enabled to access anytime and anywhere to information through tablets and smartphones (Messenger & Gschwind, 2016). More importantly, there is a paucity of empirical research addressing control and supervisory in mobile working and how these issues related to autonomy perceptions (e.g. Dambrin, 2004 Leclercq-Vandelannoitte et al., 2014; Limburg & Jackson, 2007). In this context, empirical results found that mobile teleworkers defend their autonomy and 90 resist new forms of control, or, on the contrary, accepted intrusive control (enabled by mobile technologies), in exchange of higher flexibility. In order to provide insights about the interplay between control and autonomy in the context of remote working, we conducted a longitudinal case study in an Italian subsidiary of a Dutch company manufacturing and selling pneumatic solutions. In PneumOne (a pseudonym) we conducted 21 semi-structured interviews lasting 90 minutes on average with all sales force and their sales manager in the transition from office-based mobile working, i.e. all salespeople had an assigned workstation in different local branch located all over the country, to home-based mobile teleworking. This was due to the dismiss of all Italian local branches with the exception of one located in Northern Italy, that became the only corporate headquarters for all Italian employees, both office-based and home-based. Interviews,