| Summary: | In Western countries, telework has become a massive work practice. Nevertheless, despite the media hype of the nineties, it remains largely unknown and misunderstood. Albeit telework is not teleservices, it participates in the same way to the communication and ICT utopia. Currently, teleworkers in the First World number between 10 and 20 % of the workforce. The rise of tele access technologies, the demand of business flexibility in the so-called “globalized new economy”, and urban congestion, are the main reasons for teleworking practices. Field experimentations in large metropolitan areas reveal teleworking’s major stakes: to maintain economic efficiency, ecological sustainability and quality of life. Rural applications of telework are statistically less significant, but support the popular utopia of the return to nature.Telework is fully embedded in the rise of new space/time flexibilities, which result in the confusion of old taxonomies and structures: centre/periphery, urban/rural, workplace/home. For these reasons, telework largely appears as a pervasive, but underground phenomenon.
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