Legitimizing and Elevating Telework

Abstract

Telework—the performance of paid labor activities at sites other than conventional workplaces and through the use of communication technologies—has not been considered a legitimate work form in China. Analyzing in-depth interviews thematically, the authors found that teleworkers from the post-80s generation not only legitimized their work form pragmatically and morally but also elevated it as a better choice for more achievement, flexibility, autonomy, efficiency, and professional development. Although they evaluated their choice positively, these teleworkers also acknowledged the unique challenges in cultivating guanxi (building relationships) and careers in China when working remotely. The authors suggest that telework in China offers a contested site for studying the dialectic tensions between traditional Chinese values and Western business discourses.

Keywords

business communication telework technology China legitimacy post-80s generation nonstandard work arrangements Chinese values

With the prevalence of asynchronous communication and information technologies and efforts to consume less energy by avoiding commutes to workplaces, telework, also known as telecommuting, came to media attention in the West several decades ago (Joice, 1998). Today, many people work in airports, cafés, and at their homes or other locations, connecting with their workplaces via easy-to-use and inexpensive technologies (Spinuzzi, 2012). In some cases, entire organizations operate from “instant office” locations around the globe rather than from colocated physical office spaces (Reinsch & Turner, 2006). These alternative or nonstandard work arrangements, typically considered as any spatiotemporal form of employment that differs from the prototypical nine-to-five office format, have created the sustained interest of communication researchers in the West. Their body of work examines the physical and technological arrangements, benefits, and downsides of telework and the management of teleworkers and their projects (Ballard & Gossett, 2007; Fonner & Roloff, 2010, 2012; Hylmö & Buzzanell, 2002; Lister & Harnish, 2011; Spinuzzi, 2012; Wapshott & Mallett, 2012).

Despite the popularity of telework in the Western literature, little to no research has been conducted in the East about the communication that underlies this emerging work arrangement. Specifically, researchers have not yet explored Chinese teleworkers’ discourse about the forms, meanings, and competing interests in telework arrangements. As Western researchers have noted, telework as a discourse and a practice is inherently paradoxical. We argue that in China, telework also offers a contested site for studying the dialectic tensions between traditional Chinese values and Western business discourses, thus enabling us to develop more complex understandings of business communication in Asia. Using legitimacy theory as a lens to analyze telework discourses, we examine how telework, as a new form of business and technical communication, is changing Chinese employees’ constructions of their work. We also study how teleworkers in Chinese businesses express their need to negotiate telework’s legitimacy with Chinese values.

This empirical investigation into telework in China contributes to inquiry at the intersections of business and technologically mediated communication in the East and developing countries (Dwyer, 2011). It also responds to calls by Putnam (2012) to pursue scholarship that integrates studies on internationalization and organizational or societal problems more deeply within organizational communication research and by Reinsch and Turner (2006) to reorient business communication scholarship toward rhetorical traditions that explore “a whole new set of questions designed to yield better understanding of specific technologies, evolving practices, and new forms of business relationships” (p. 351). Finally, this study enriches our understanding of telework’s legitimacy, meaningfulness, and role in changing organization–employee relationships in China (Buzzanell & Lucas, 2013; Cheney, Kendall, Lair, & Ritz, 2010; Cheney, Zorn, Planalp, & Lair, 2008; Hylmö, 2006; Mumby & Stohl, 1996). Before we describe our method for the study and present our findings, we first define teleworkers and review the literature that is relevant to this study.

Literature Review

Teleworkers are those who perform their paid activities at a site other than conventional workplaces and whose work is supported by communication technologies (Fitzer, 1997). Telework is contested because researchers and practitioners have different criteria and timetables for determining virtuality, temporal synchrony and asynchrony, and place. We focus on “high-intensity” teleworkers in China, meaning those who work for an employer full time and spend at least three days per week at remote locations (Fonner & Roloff, 2010). Because there is little research on telework in China, we argue that the reported experiences and discourse of high-intensity teleworkers, as opposed to those who only do such work at home occasionally, provide insight into emerging orientations toward work and changing social values in the Chinese business context.

In the West, research results regarding teleworkers’ (and coworkers’) satisfaction with this work arrangement are equivocal. Findings depend on the reasons, arrangements, and rewards for telework as well as the control over teleworkers’ time, space, and relationships (e.g., Fonner & Roloff, 2010; Hylmö & Buzzanell, 2002). Whereas some findings suggest that teleworkers are able to do paid labor more effectively and efficiently and with greater personal satisfaction and to manage their work and personal life activities more easily, other findings suggest that teleworkers are less productive and beneficial than are traditional office workers. Reasons for less positive assessments center on teleworkers’ lack of face time and presence at the workplace, limited access to organizational resources and development opportunities, and feelings that they have less camaraderie with supervisors and coworkers. In addition, teleworkers and supervisors may be less trustful and committed to each other than are employees and supervisors at more traditional workplaces (Fonner & Roloff, 2010; Hylmö & Buzzanell, 2002; Perlow, 1998; Spinuzzi, 2012). Further, teleworkers may paradoxically want to be separated from yet connected to others during their paid labor (Leonardi, Treem, & Jackson, 2010; Spinuzzi, 2012).

As an emerging work arrangement, telework’s legitimacy is contested and negotiated. Organizational legitimacy has been defined as “a generalized perception or assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable, or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs, and definitions” (Suchman, 1995, p. 575). In everyday talk, legitimacy discourses are reasons or rationales for choices, with underlying differences in linguistic usages, decision premises, and argument structure (Green, Li, & Nohria, 2009; Suddaby & Greenwood, 2005). Legitimacy forms and processes involve discursive and material struggles to persuade others that certain activities are desirable or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs, and definitions (Green et al., 2009). Such discourses and associated materials about telework arrangements would need to become part of the taken for granted work aspects to be perceived as legitimate (Suddaby & Greenwood, 2005).

Three primary forms of legitimacy—cognitive, pragmatic, and moral—can inform understandings of nonstandard work arrangements (Hylmö, 2006). Cognitive legitimacy is based on the available cultural models that provide plausible explanations and taken for granted assumptions about phenomena, such as telework. Pragmatic legitimacy rests on evaluators’ self-interested calculations of a phenomenon’s practical consequences. In the case of telework, it includes (a) dispositional legitimacy, based on whether the values of teleworkers and the organization align; (b) influence legitimacy, based on whether the organization is responsive to teleworkers’ needs; and (c) exchange legitimacy, based whether the organizational policy has value to teleworkers (Suchman, 1995). Whereas pragmatic legitimacy rests on judgments about whether a given activity benefits the evaluator, moral legitimacy rests on judgments about whether the activity is the right thing for the evaluator to do. Moral legitimacy reflects a positive normative evaluation of the organization and its activities. Relating to telework, moral legitimacy can be further categorized into (a) procedural legitimacy, based on the establishment of systematic procedures to assist telework accomplishment; (b) structural legitimacy, based on the sound work systems within the telework organization; (c) personal legitimacy, based on the authority and credibility of telework leaders; and (d) consequential legitimacy, based on the validity of work outcomes (Suchman, 1995). Researchers have explored the U.S. teleworkers’ work-location choices (e.g., Hylmö, 2006), yet how telework is constructed, perceived, practiced, and legitimized in non-Western business contexts is less known.

As one of the leading developing countries in Asia that is undergoing socioeconomic transformation, China provides a unique context for advancing our understanding of business communication in Asia. In the past few decades, radical shifts in the Chinese workplace have taken place as China transitions from a planned to a market-oriented economy. These changes include the demise of permanent employment and lifelong welfare, the implementation of labor contracting and performance-based employment, the emergence of foreign investment, the adoption of Western management philosophies, and the prevalence of communication technologies in the workplace (e.g., Tsui, Schoonhoven, Meyer, Lau, & Milkovich, 2004). As a result, work-related values and beliefs from Capitalism, Communism, and Confucianism conjoin and clash in Chinese business communication (Lucas, Liu, & Buzzanell, 2006). Thus, we ask, How do Chinese employees perceive and legitimize their telework experiences in their everyday life? In the following section, we describe the data collection and analysis method used to explore this research question.

Method

Prior to collecting the data for this study, we gained approval from the Institutional Research Board at our university to conduct this investigation using human subjects. Two of us, who are both fluent in Chinese, recruited participants through convenience sampling. We screened the participants by asking them three questions: Do you work virtually from home at least three days a week? Do you have a supervisor or leader? and Do you have an actual office in your organization’s workplace (i.e., a physical space where paid labor is conducted alongside colleagues)? We recruited for this study those who answered yes to all three questions.

We informed the potential participants about the project and assured them that participation in the study was strictly voluntary and confidential. Once the participants gave their verbal consent, we collected data through in-depth interviews to privilege participants’ own words and sense making about telework. We conducted all the interviews in the participants’ native language (Mandarin) following a semistructured interview guide to ensure the natural flow of conversation (Lindlof & Taylor, 2002). This guide had four parts, which focused on their background (e.g., “Tell us about yourself … your telework experiences … your typical work day”), meaningful work (e.g., “How do you define ‘a good [tele]worker?’”), career (e.g., “Would you perceive your current telework as your career?”), and work–life balance (e.g., “What’s your ideal life style?”), plus a closing. Interviews were conducted over Skype or QQ and audiotape-recorded with participants’ permission. The average interview length was 70 minutes (ranging from 60 to 90 minutes). Transcriptions of these interviews into Chinese resulted in 84 single-spaced pages (an average of 11 pages per interview). To ensure confidentiality, we used pseudonyms in the transcripts.

Participants

Four women and four men from urban areas across China participated in our study (see Table 1). They were, on average, 27 years of age (ranging from 25 to 30 years of age) and belonged to the post-80s generation in China (born in China in the 1980s). To our participants’ knowledge, most teleworkers in China are from this generation because they are more technology savvy and open-minded to alternative forms of work and career (Sun & Wang, 2010). Most of the participants were single, and all had at least a college degree. At the time of our interviews, participants had been teleworking, on average, for 2 years (ranging from 1 to 5 years). Participants worked for private or foreign companies as full-time teleworkers in varied industries. Some had corporate laptops and corporate cell phones whereas others supplied their own basic technologies such as phones and Internet access. All had contracts outlining expectations for productivity and providing medical and retirement benefits as well as workers’ compensation.

Table 1.

Participants’ Demographic Information.

Pseudonym	Gender	Location	Occupation	Length of Teleworking
Chenghao	Male	Beijing	Book translator	6 months
Ying	Female	Shanghai	Marketing research consultant	3 years
Wu	Female	Xi’an	Book publisher	3 years
Luyi	Male	Guangzhou	Travel agent	1 year
Cui	Female	Beijing	Journalist	2 years
Hao	Male	Beijing	Gaming music composer	2 years
Bao	Female	Beijing	TV program producer	2 years
Chan	Male	Beijing	New media project manager	2 years

Analysis

During the interviews and transcriptions, we jotted notes and discussed emerging themes with each other. After we transcribed the interviews into Chinese, one of us who is fluent in Mandarin Chinese met with our non-Chinese-speaking collaborator—an expert in work arrangements, organizational communication, and aspects of Chinese culture—who then asked questions about participants’ linguistic choices, work settings, company policies, recurrent phrases and semantic meaning patterns, and other contextual aspects that might influence our study results. All three of us engaged in discussions about the content and meaning of the interview data within the Chinese business context. Then we selectively translated the Chinese transcripts into English for use in this article.

Throughout our data analysis, we read and reread the transcripts and revisited themes and supporting data with an eye toward thematic criteria of recurrence, repetition, and forcefulness (Owen, 1984). Thus, in our discussions with each other, we developed themes by constantly referring to participants’ reported incidents in order to tease out key dimensions of the topic (Lindlof & Taylor, 2002). We engaged with the data according to Charmaz’s (2000) social constructionist approach, considering knowledge and meanings as residing not solely in people or data but between them, paying attention to our own positionalities. Following Charmaz, we considered methods to be “flexible, heuristic strategies rather than as formulaic procedures” (p. 510). We focused on the discursive strategies and struggles whereby participants legitimized their telework. In the section following section, we elaborate on the findings of our study based on this methodological approach.

Findings

We found that teleworkers in China employed different pragmatic and moral legitimacy strategies to account for their alternative work form. Use of these two legitimacy tactics would be expected since pragmatic and moral rhetorical arguments are more prevalent at beginning stages of institutional change (Green et al., 2009), that is, during the emergence of telework in China. All of the participants positioned themselves discursively in a hierarchically higher category of work status insofar as they elevated telework as a better choice than working in the office because telework provided more practical implications for employees and enabled them to gain more positive normative approval from others. Thus, they implied telework’s taken for grantedness, or cognitive legitimacy (Green et al., 2009), before discursively repositioning telework as better than standard arrangements because it supplied more and better benefits. In this way, they may have been trying to lessen others’ possible negativity about telework by preemptively elevating their status. Although actively engaging in this legitimacy dialectic to elevate telework itself, they acknowledged unique challenges in cultivating guanxi and pursuing advancement in China.

Pragmatic Legitimation

In their discursive constructions of their work, all the participants granted dispositional legitimacy to telework by describing a set of values and goals that they share with their organizations and fellow teleworkers. Chenghao, a book translator teleworking for a publisher in Beijing, talked about “publishing good books for people to read” as the core value that he shared with other organizational members:

We all want to make the book better. The editors plan things; the marketing people develop campaigns; and what I do is to translate the book well so that in the end the readers would have a good reading experience.

Chenghao’s language choices afforded dispositional legitimacy to telework because he served clients well by enhancing their reading satisfaction, which also was the goal of his employer and one with which he strongly identified (see Klein, Molloy, & Brinsfield, 2012). Cui, a journalist in a privately owned news media organization, also talked about the support for telework that she perceived because of her organization’s result-oriented culture. She said, “In our company, it does not matter if you show up in the office or not, or how close you and the leaders are. What matters is that your name shows up on the byline of the magazine.” Cui expressed pleasure in her telework arrangement because she was evaluated on her output rather than how well she handled workplace politics. In sum, Chinese participants legitimized their telework by emphasizing the shared values and goals (i.e., customer-oriented and results-oriented) that were embodied in it.

Participants also used influence legitimacy based on their perceptions of telework’s responsiveness to their needs and work. Participants implied that when employers attended to their needs and interests, just as employers did for office employees in traditional workplaces, they viewed telework as an alternative way to work rather than as a deviant or less important work arrangement. As Chan, a project manager in a new media company, commented, “I like smaller companies [more than large corporations]. . . . They respect individuals and their needs. . . . If an employee works best at home, [that employee] can then work at home.” Chan perceived his ability to make a personal choice to benefit himself and his organization as important enough to drive his assessments of the fit, or congruence, between individual needs and organizational influences (see Dipboye, 2005) and his decision to remain in his current work arrangement and organization. Wu, a district manager working in a satellite home office for a children’s book publisher, described her employer’s responsiveness to teleworkers’ interests:

I am grateful to be able to work at home, and I like my lifestyle. . . . I can cook a meal for myself for lunch. . . . After I finish my work or a meeting with the client, I sometimes just go shopping or watch a movie to relax.

As Wu indicated, Chinese teleworkers legitimatized their work form by highlighting how telework corresponded to their needs for, and abilities to engage in, activities consistent with their work–life balance and personal well-being.

Teleworkers also used exchange legitimacy to justify their choice of work form; they granted telework legitimacy based on the direct value that the telework policy had for them. With one exception, all participants made it a point to mention that they received benefits, insurance coverage, and salaries similar to and often higher than those accorded to employees holding similar office positions. In using these exchange legitimacy moves, they described telework just like they would any other full-time job. For example, Ying quit her full-time office job and became a marketing research teleworker for a consulting agency because she could maintain the same benefit package as full-time employees without actually working in the office. As she explained, “Since the employer offered me the full package, I don’t see the point of not accepting a job that does not mandate going to work.” For Ying, working at home was attractive because she did not need to commute to her workplace, and she could engage in desirable activities. Without telework, she could not have achieved these benefits.

Pragmatic Elevation

Beyond noting that telework had pragmatic legitimacy insofar as it did not offer fewer employee benefits than does office work, all the participants talked about how they received more benefits from their telework than they would have in similar office jobs. Teleworkers perceived that their arrangements promoted their professional growth in ways not anticipated by most Western literature. Most participants discussed how they were able to use the time that they saved from commuting to build better relationships with clients. For example, Wu made the following comment:

My job relies on my relationship with clients. Since I don’t have to commute and stay in the office, I can spend a whole afternoon chatting with my client or business partner about what is going on in our lives besides work. I think my friendship with my clients helps my work a lot, which I don’t think my office-based colleagues will be able to achieve by simply calling and e-mailing the clients.

And Luyi, a sales representative for a travel agency, acknowledged that he would be unable to do the professional networking that was necessary for his work and long-term career goals if he did not telework: “[Telework allows me to] meet professionals from other travel agencies…. They recognize my face, and they will bring me business.” Telework also promoted the participants’ professional development because its flexibility afforded them the time and energy to keep up-to-date with new developments in their field and to learn new skills relevant to their careers without being accused of “taking work time to do other things.” As Chan stated, “When I am not at meetings, I will read blogs and articles related to my work. . . . I learn new things every day, and I have to (learn new things) to stay in the business.”

Compared to traditional office work, all the participants believed that they gained a stronger sense of achievement from telework and thus regarded their work as more personally meaningful. That is, their work was meaningful because it aligned with their work ethics or their symbolic work meanings as well as their professional and personal well-being (Cheney et al., 2008; Ciulla, 2000). They said that they experienced more of a start-to-finish production process in which they could see how their work was displayed and used by clients and consumers (e.g., books in bookstores, articles on Web sites, or programs on television). Also, the participants took on independent tasks (e.g., creating market research reports) for which they could take more credit and have greater input instead of just serve as “a small screw on a bigger machine.” Cui, a journalist who works from home, summarized why her work was so meaningful to her:

This work is my stage to showcase what I am capable of. My clients speak highly of my work, my boss acknowledges my talent, and I will be able to see the final products that I work on. . . . The sense of achievement provides meaning to my work.

Finally, all the participants elevated their work arrangement pragmatically by describing how it enabled them to better manage their time and gave them more autonomy and control in accomplishing their work as compared to traditional office arrangements. As Ying explained, “If I am having an unproductive day, I can just call it a day at noon and add in some more working hours tomorrow. I am very flexible in time as long as I can finish the project.” And Luyi added, “How to get things done when you work at home is largely at your own discretion. You enjoy more freedom as you don’t have to stick to others’ rules about ‘how things should be done.’” Such feelings of autonomy and choice align with workers’ feelings of dignity and worth (Buzzanell & Lucas, 2013). But none of the participants had extensive office experiences on which to judge how standard workplaces operated over time. At most, they had about 1 or 2 years of office experience in positions that were not at the higher levels that typically afford incumbents greater influence over work.

Moral Legitimation

Besides legitimizing and elevating telework as “better for workers,” participants granted moral legitimacy to telework arrangements by arguing that “telework is the right work arrangement” from the organization’s perspective. They often found themselves questioned by others about the nature of, their commitments to, schedules for, and other aspects of working at home, a place that is usually associated with nonwork activities. Since telework emerged only recently in China, standard operating procedures were unavailable when our participants’ telework arrangements began. As a result, participants described how they deliberately established procedures so that they would have temporal control systems similar to the corporate clock in order to support their legitimacy claims and to regulate themselves. By sharing their work procedures and typical work days, the participants sought to establish the moral legitimacy of this work form to others. They reported that they and their supervisors designed their everyday work procedures based on prior colocated work experiences and from trial and error. Wu talked about how she managed to establish work routines so that her telework experience as a book publisher was “almost the same except that I do not ‘go to work.’” She emphasized, “You must establish procedures if you work at home. Because you don’t have to punch in and out for attendance at work, you will need to rely on your self-discipline.” Ying echoed the importance of establishing telework procedures and talked about how she and her supervisor in their consulting company developed a daily communication routine after she failed to complete a project due to their miscommunication.

In addition to establishing work procedures, all the participants engaged in structural legitimacy strategies by deliberately arguing that their roles and functions in the organizational structure were just as important as, if not more important than, that of colocated peers and units in their company headquarters. Ying explained that her telework had structural legitimacy in that she had the highly desirable skill sets required for her work:

Many people can’t do what I do [i.e., make cold calls to people, persuade them to participate in telephone interviews about products], and I know many people quit after their first project because they can’t handle rejections. However, I can deal with that, and I know how to persuade people and dig for information.

Over a third of the participants also sought to demonstrate their structural legitimacy by highlighting their familiarity with and proximity to targeted consumer markets or suppliers that were located at a distance from the headquarters. For instance, Luyi described how he served as a bridge between the company in Macao and the mainland consumer market by working from his home in Guangzhou. Furthermore, telework’s structural legitimacy largely depended on work outcomes. Because the participants’ work processes could be invisible to management, they perceived that they needed to use their results to prove their personal and structural worth to their employers. As Luyi said, “I need to constantly prove myself by generating satisfying sales result[s]. Hopefully they won’t restructure or eliminate my office.” This point was echoed by Chenghao, “I need to meet or even exceed the expectations of the editors so they will assign better books for me to translate.” In short, not only did the participants discursively construct the structural legitimacy of their companies, they also felt pressure to maintain this legitimacy by routinely demonstrating their organizational contributions.

Finally, the participants perceived that their supervisors, especially their immediate bosses, played critical roles in helping them legitimize their work internally (see Hylmö & Buzzanell, 2002). For instance, Hao, a gaming music composer, commented, “The better I do my job, the more he [supervisor] likes to work with me. He will talk to others about how good I am as an employee, and my status will be raised. If he doesn’t like me or support me, I probably will lose my job.” All the participants talked about how their supervisors legitimized the arrangement discursively through their consent or materially through their own telework arrangements. Bao, a TV program producer, explained that “the reason my colleagues and I can telework is partly because our supervisor is a nice boss and very result oriented. She cares more about the outcome. Anything else does not matter much.” In addition, Ying said that her telework received legitimacy because her supervisor also teleworked: “He understands what I am experiencing ‘at work.’”

Thus, to legitimize their nonstandard work form, the participants established work procedures, emphasized their organizational contributions, and used their leaders as role models and advocates.

Moral Elevation

The participants also used moral-elevating strategies in evaluating telework’s normative approval by positioning telework as the right choice over office-based work arrangements because teleworking enhanced the effectiveness and efficiency of the work itself. First, teleworkers did not have to spend time “go[ing] to work” and feel stressed about wasting time commuting. As Chan explained, “[office commuters] can get stuck in traffic or on public transportation for hours, and people are jammed into subways during peak hours” whereas teleworkers can simply “open the computer and start working.” Moreover, teleworking can protect employees from office politics and meeting interruptions so that they can fully embrace the work; that is, they described how their minds, hearts, and bodies were oriented harmoniously toward work itself and not toward unproductive feelings or behaviors. As Luyi put it, “You don’t have to pretend you are busy or show other colleagues that you are so dedicated that you come early and stay at work late. The energy you saved for the ‘face work’ could be used on your ‘real work.’” The participants also talked about telework as a better choice because of the nature of their work and profession. Hao perceived that the nature of his work as a gaming music composer was better suited for telework because he needed “the space to think alone and quietly.” Similarly, Bao, a TV program producer, commented that telework was the right choice for creative industry professionals like her in order to avoid “becoming stiff or rigid.” In sum, the participants actively elevated telework as the right choice by highlighting the ways in which this work arrangement helped them to work efficiently and the fit between telework and the nature of the work itself.

Challenges in Managing the Legitimation–Elevation Dialectic

The participants admitted that they struggled in both legitimizing and elevating telework as an appropriate and desirable work form in China because they experienced unique challenges in cultivating workplace guanxi and pursuing career advancement.

Guanxi refers to the process of establishing and nurturing connections in order to secure favors in personal relationships (Dunning & Kim, 2007). It is an inseparable part of the Chinese business environment and fundamental to the web of interpersonal relations permeating Chinese societies. While colocated workers can cultivate guanxi in daily interactions at work, teleworkers may face barriers in developing and nurturing beneficial workplace guanxi due to their lack of physical presence in the workplace. Most participants expressed that they felt “left out” from their organizations’ social networks and found it challenging to create and maintain the effective relationships with colleagues and company leaders so critical to employability and professional development (for leader–member exchange, see Fairhurst, 2001). As Bao, a TV program producer, commented, “if you do not show up in the office or mingle with other colleagues, they won’t know what you are doing and they won’t nominate or support you even if you have what it takes to be promoted.”

In addition to challenges in nurturing guanxi, the participants perceived that they received less attention and support from their organizations once they accepted their jobs compared to that received by colocated employees. Half of our participants reported that their organizations did a poor job responding to their desires for assistance in career development and their concerns about job stability. They expressed concern that their jobs might not be as stable as those of their colocated counterparts (i.e., their jobs were offered based on short-term corporate goals). They also expressed concern that their career advancement was limited, speaking specifically about lack of opportunities (e.g., for promotion or moving to other functional areas) and resources (e.g., for training, mentoring, or informal socialization). Their concerns about career advancement are similar to those documented by researchers studying teleworkers in the West (e.g., Hylmö & Buzzanell, 2002).

Participants also discussed the challenges they experienced in constructing rhetorical arguments that would legitimize and elevate telework to others in Chinese contexts. They perceived that developing guanxi was more difficult because their coworkers and supervisors did not have an accurate understanding of telework’s nature and processes. For instance, participants operating in matrix organizations shared their discursive and material struggles with telework’s legitimacy. According to Bao, company supervisors other than her own project manager would assign her extra tasks without checking her availability because they assumed that teleworkers had much free time and were constantly in the “standby” mode: “They just throw this task to you and expect to hear back from you in 30 min. But I was busy. Working at home does not mean I don’t have anything important to do.” The participants admitted that people still took for granted that traditional office-based work was the only legitimate work arrangement in contemporary Chinese business settings. Ying’s comment illustrated this presumption that the workplace was the legitimate site of paid labor:

When people ask me what I do, I tell them “I am in marketing,” and they would just assume that I work in the office. They don’t question that. However, when I tell them I work at home, their impression is that you are so lucky because you can just stay home and fool around when the rest of us have to work. It’s like I don’t work at all.

The participants indicated that this taken for grantedness was embedded in their parents’ (generational) perceptions of knowledge-based work, where “work at home” or “telework” was considered “not appropriate” (Wapshott & Mallett, 2012). As Chenghao expressed, “My parents still want me to find a stable, office-based, white-collar job. They do not even see my telework job as appropriate, let alone consider it as a good job.” Thus, teleworkers carried the burden of proof in constructing rhetorical arguments that would enable others to understand and accept the legitimacy of telework as an alternative—perhaps even better—work arrangement in China. The implications of these findings are discussed in the section below.

Discussion

Our findings demonstrate that post-80s Chinese teleworkers regularly engage in legitimation–elevation dialectics, constructing rhetorical arguments to convince others of telework’s viability in Chinese cultural and organizational contexts. They also acknowledge specific challenges, such as in cultivating guanxi and advancing their careers. In situating telework as equal to or better than standard work arrangements, teleworkers invoke arguments aligned with economic, client-welfare, organizational-value, efficiency-and-effectiveness, and personal-interest claims. Their perception that they must engage in multiple rhetorical strategies of pragmatic and moral legitimacy indicates not only that telework is nonnormative in China (Green et al., 2009) but also that Chinese values and Western influences result in paradoxical business discourses and materialities (see Zhu & Li, 2009).

Our research contributes to organizational legitimacy literature by illustrating the importance of complex dialectics that consider multiple forms of legitimacy. We demonstrate how different legitimacy strategies “coexist, contest, undermine and support each other” (Hylmö, 2006, p. 562). More important, we contribute to business communication scholarship in China by showing how our participants position telework as similar to (legitimation) as well as better than (elevation) standard work arrangements. These rhetorical arguments establish the bases for transformation of Chinese workplaces (see Buzzanell et al., 1997). They frame telework as the right choice because it minimizes constraints and interruptions in the workplace while providing employees with a greater sense of achievement, autonomy, efficiency, and self-development.

Furthermore, we contribute to telework as an emerging discourse in Chinese business communication that highlights workers’ agency in crafting the meanings and meaningfulness of work (Cheney et al., 2008) and dignity (Buzzanell & Lucas, 2013). The post-80s teleworkers’ expressions about their own choice and freedom to elect telework indicate that choice itself may be an underlying motivation and potential pathway to worker dignity in China. In such rhetoric, teleworkers attribute their individual career choices to personal taste and preferences but also note that their career choices are constrained by workplace realities, cultural norms, and family expectations. Others contest their choices as they both pursue nonnormative career and life options and problematize dominant definitions of work and career in the Chinese context (Buzzanell & Lucas, 2013). The notion of choice in telework and other workplace practices in China deserves further attention for exploring intersections of Chinese values and Western business discourses.

Furthermore, our findings offer practical implications. We recommend that Chinese teleworkers and their organizations design publicity about telework options in order to help legitimize processes and standard operating procedures that link organizational members’ work and career expectations with communication technologies and organizational (e.g., matrix) structures. Moreover, organizations need management teams that are committed to implementing successful telework arrangements and promoting cultures that value its members’ needs, talents, and well-being. Our findings suggest that teleworkers need to advocate for changes in organizational policies and procedures in order to protect their own interests. Additionally, the development and review of Chinese telework policy, such as the study Gibbs, Scott, Kim, and Lee (2010) conducted for the 35 U.S. state governments, can provide stronger bases for telework legitimacy as well as for negotiations between organizational employers and teleworkers about rules, expectations, equipment, and other support.

The implications of our study are limited by its exploratory nature. Although our research represents the first attempt in the communication field to examine teleworkers in mainland China, our small sample (N = 8) may not represent the telework community in China. Also, we did not interview teleworkers’ supervisors and colocated colleagues about their understanding of telework; rather, we reported only on teleworkers’ perceptions of their work form and of the effectiveness of their legitimization strategies.

We urge continued research into the paradoxes and consequences of telework in China. Such research should include larger samples and broader organizational and industry bases. From our data, we speculate that the Chinese might perceive telework in China to be more of an embodied phenomenon—harmony between mind, heart, and body—than that portrayed in the Western literature. We encourage longitudinal research to consider how the technological, historical, and socioeconomic context of China affects the emerging practices and meaningfulness of telework for individuals and organizations. In conclusion, we found that Chinese teleworkers actively engage in legitimizing and elevating their telework arrangements. They believe that their choice to telework benefits their organizations and themselves, but they express concerns about cultivating guanxi and career advancement. Our study offers insight into the changing nature and conduct of business and technical communication in China.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article .

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