"Our life is the farm and farming is our life": Home-work coordination in organic farm families
Paper in proceeding, 2014

We present a qualitative study of 13 farm families who intentionally merge their home and work lives. This is in contrast to most families studied in CSCW, who are urban/ suburban, white-collar and often dual-income, where the goal is to balance separate home and work spheres. We analyze the farm families' coordination practices along three dimensions - space, time, and roles - and contrast their experiences to what is known in CSCW about family coordination practices. Through this, we reveal blind spots in CSCW's study of and support for family coordination toward building better tools to support such activities. We emphasize considering colocation rather than assuming geographic distribution across life spheres, the value of natural rhythms in understanding and supporting family life, and how taking on simultaneous roles can be viewed as a life goal rather than a source of conflict.

qualitative studies

coordination

farms

home-work split

families

rural

family business

Author

Gilly Leshed

Cornell University

Maria Håkansson

Chalmers, Applied Information Technology (Chalmers), Interaction design

Joseph 'Jofish' Kaye

Yahoo Research Labs

Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing (CSCW '14)

487-498
978-1-4503-2540-0 (ISBN)

Subject Categories

Agricultural Science

Human Computer Interaction

DOI

10.1145/2531602.2531708

ISBN

978-1-4503-2540-0

More information

Latest update

4/12/2018