For the last 150 years we can say that the relationship between work and home has been essentially oppositional : while a few professions allowed a partial integration of the two, most workers had to keep them well separated. The most widespread work model required a rigid separation of private and work realms as the expectation was that a worker was paid for dedicating his strength, skills, attention for a certain amount of time uniquely to the activities needed for the completion of his job. This separation of workplace and home is a relatively recent solution linked to the generalization of the industrial organisation as seen in the mills of the 19th century. It emerged only when workers had to go to dedicated spaces to carry out their tasks on specialized machines that they could not bring home..
Sociologists like Max Weber and Michel Foucault have well described how this work ethic went hand in hand with many other social phenomena such as the transformation of families, the creation of a general educational system, the role of women in the workforce etc. This model has been embedded in the urban plans of modern cities, with the separation of residential areas from manufacturing, administrative and commercial areas. Most american cities and more and more european cities have a city center dominated by offices and some shops and a a sprawling suburbia dedicated uniquely to family dwellings. A simple tour of medieval cities like Siena or Florence or Amsterdam with their streets named after the guilds and professions all offer a view of a time when labour and daily life mingled completely. As late as 1970, in northern Italy in cities like Busto Arsizio or Treviso where a vibrant small family run textile industry developed after WW2, it was still possible to see the owners of the company living in beautifully decorated villas just on the side of the factory plant.
The separation of realms means that the worker has to undertake a more or less lengthy journey from his house to the workplace every day. This journey is not only a physical transportation but also a psychological transformation from the home persona to the work persona. In her book Home and Work, Nippert Eng described how people go through a set of rituals to move from the home mentality to the work mentality. The separation between home and workplace is not in fact just a spatial one, and in some cases people she interviewed even worked at home. The two environments correspond to two mental states and identities and everyone has elaborated techniques and habits to shed the home mentality in the morning and get into the work one and then again leave the professional one in the evening to resume the private one at home. These practices can be as simple as putting on specific clothes for each environment, reading the newspaper, drinking coffee or having a beer at the end of the day.
In her observations it is very clear that adopting the work mentality is far more difficult than shedding it in the evening. Three phenomena seem to be happening in the morning, people are putting on a face or persona compatible with their professional role, they are building up their concentration for the execution of their job, in order to achieve this they are actively removing the personal issues from their attention span. This last point is accomplished by activities like tiding up before leaving the house, separation rituals with family members, etc.
In our own observations we saw that people listen to different types of music and radio channels on the way to work than on the way back, they read different newspapers and drink different drinks. Everything on the way to work is oriented towards building up focus, attention and concentration. On the way back it is all about winding down.
Clearly the fact that getting focused requires such an elaborate set of rituals indicates that putting "other" thoughts in the back of one's mind, is emotionally costly. However, this huge effort of revving up attention and leaving behind personal issues is seen as a normal part of a professional stance. For the same reasons, people who work from home either because of the nature of their profession or at the requirement of their employer are considered with slight suspicion and generally systems of control are applied to regulate their comittment. Freelancers who work from home, are for instance payed not for their time but for a piece produce, shifting to the worker the responsibility of "effectively" using their time. Journalists, artists, and in less developed areas, women who manufacture goods at home. are payed for the piece they produce and not a fix wage.
There seem therefore to be two solutions to control professional commitment and production : either enforce some form of regulation to separate the working activities from the rest of the workers' lives thus depriving them from the potential disruption of other personal events, or to push on individuals the self discipline of dedicating their full attention to the task, by linking their revenue to the use of their time.
Interestingly strict separation of professional from private is not the only institutional mode, there certainly are cases and professions in which the private and professional can mingle. However this compenetration of the two realms has been a privilege of the elites such as academics, managers and students in higher education. People who in other words have proven their self restraint and commitment, and who are capable of switching between the two worlds without losing too much time and attention and who can be trusted to get their priorities right. For everyone else however, leaving home in the morning meant leaving behind the affects, the tasks, the worries and tribulations of the private life to embrace the emotions, practices and roles of the work life.