Bringing it all back home: The extensification and 'overflowing' of work

This paper explores the extensification of work-that is the distribution or exporting of work across different spaces/scales and times-and its impact on individual workers and households. We argue that contracting out and the work life balance debates might be developed more usefully within the holistic framework of extensification. The key process that we follow can be described as overflowing. We contrast the universally positive representations of spillovers and embedding that we are familiar with in economic geographies with the more negatively characterised overflowing of work into and out of the household. The paper is built around a case study of those involved in the new media industry in San Francisco: households, workers and companies.