The Public and the Private: Now, Future and With Ageing

By Wendy Parkin and Jeff Hearn

Work, that is employed and paid work, and private life are often spoken of as separate worlds. Yet, the notional separation of the public and the private clearly varies immensely by class, occupation, gender, ethnicity and racialisation. Women have always worked in the home, mainly unpaid, and for many this was and still is their main workplace. But many millions have also always worked in the public world of paid work. While in many societies, and not only advanced economic societies, it is commonplace for women to be in the paid workforce, the notional public/private split persists – even if many women are never really free of family obligations when at work. For some people, there is really no separate private world, but rather that is incorporated within the public world of others, as, for example, when workers live in their place of employment or are beholden to employers for their accommodation in other ways. Meanwhile, and in contrast, another way in which these boundaries can blur is when the private is embedded in the public when, for example, a person has sole occupancy of a ‘private’ office as one of the perks of reaching higher office. Such spaces may in turn be made homelike with the presence of personal ‘domestic’ items, for example, family photos or children’s drawings.

These issues of the public and the private have long preoccupied us, and indeed are a major thread in our new book, Age at Work. There, we also explore the importance, and yet ambiguity, of work-life boundaries at different stages of life and with changes with ageing. The dividing line between the public world of paid work and the private world of personal and family life is both real and fictional – and shifts with ageing.

On top of this, just as we were in the final stages of writing Age at Work, these questions were suddenly thrown into sharper relief by the Covid pandemic, then in its early stages. Consequently, towards the end of the book we addressed the impact of Covid on this public/private split – not least as many people now found themselves working at and from home. Over the last year or more, there has been much discussion of how, for many more people, this may become a more established, even permanent, way of life for the foreseeable future. Following what could be seen as a temporary response to the pandemic is the suggestion that some workers will never return to their desks full-time.

At the same time, increasingly sophisticated software also means that the person, and their work and productivity, can be monitored at home to ensure specific work tasks are being carried out and the necessary hours are spent ‘at the desk’. The rules of the employing organisation can in such ways be imposed on the person working in their domestic sphere. Thus, the privacy of the home becomes questionable whether from software surveillance or curiosity about possessions and appearance when the person, their domestic space and furnishings are on display with video conferencing.

All this can result in the personal private space, both literal and metaphorical, becoming the workspace, the office, along with pressures to work longer hours, as people struggle to keep personal and professional lives separate. In April 2021, Ireland introduced ‘the right to disconnect’ so employees do not have to work outside their normal hours at weekends or late at night (https://employmentrightsireland.com/the-right-to-disconnect-from-work-new-code-of-practice-from-wrc-1st-april-2021/). In some work organisations there are either clear policy rules and/or informal expectations of no emails and video meetings in evenings and weekends. These kinds of steps may help a little in redrawing the blurred boundary between home and work. On the other hand, many people, especially many who are low paid, bus drivers, taxi drivers, delivery drivers, shop assistants, cannot work from home or avoid working in shared and open plan spaces or afford to hire booths, thus meaning further inequalities.

But the public-private debate is also very much about age, and generation, too. What has the public/private got to do with age? Well, first, combined with current and predicted huge job losses in the retail sector, people over 50 losing their jobs are much more likely to stay unemployed, according to Rest Less, the ‘digital community for the over 50s’ (https://restless.co.uk/press/redundancies-amongst-the-over-50s-have-nearly-tripled-in-a-year/). Businesses are more likely to bring back younger, perhaps cheaper, workers first. As retirement age rises this could mean a generation of over 50s forced into an early retirement they neither want or can afford. Next, and all too obviously, the domestic arena, whether on view or not, is so very different at different times of life – with toddlers and young children, with teenagers hanging out, with living alone, and so on – in both immediate physical and social demands, and use and competition for space and quiet.

But then, there is a further huge and aged dimension to this whole question of public/private and the real but fictional public/private boundary. In a somewhat similar way to working at home in the pandemic, the public/private boundary blurs to the point of vanishing when the home becomes the workplace for frail old people receiving care at home. This situation does not of course only apply to old people, as younger people with disabilities also often need care at home. However, the implications are similar in that the home as a supposed place of privacy and independence changes into a workplace where the rules of the external employing care organisation come to meet, and are sometimes imposed on, the person living at home in their own private sphere. For example, the care organisation, however caring, will likely decide the designation and frequency of necessary tasks, and how long they will take.

The private home thus becomes the workplace for carers, nurses, doctors, physiotherapists, and so on. It can also be a place of surveillance when cameras can be used, in the name of safety, to see the person at home continuously and be alerted to changes in condition, falls and illnesses. And with technological developments, it is very likely indeed that the making of the home into a workplace will accelerate, both for residents and visitors, either IRL or online, and whether in regular working age or with ageing as old and partially dependent. 

These and other issues are explored in the new book, Age at Work: Ambiguous Boundaries of Organizations, Organizing and Ageing by Jeff Hearn and Wendy Parkin, with Richard Howson and Charlotta Niemistö.

Book details

Age at Work

Ambiguous Boundaries of Organizations, Organizing and Ageing

Jeff Hearn & Wendy Parkin

November 2020 | 240 pages | SAGE Publications Ltd

ISBN: 9781526427731

About the authors