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In the last few years, working from home has gone from being a rarity to a reality.

With advances in technology, more people are able to link to work from their home computers or laptops. And as employees continue to crave flexibility and yearn for a better work/life balance, more people are working from home for at least part of their workweek.

Home-based companies

While many companies are allowing existing employees to transition to various telecommuting options, some companies are also building work forces that are made up solely of employees working from home. Watch how to best handle working from home »

Here is a sample of 10 companies that only hire at-home workers:

• Alpine Access is a call center company that uses customer service representatives that work from home. Employees use their own telephones and computers. The company provides representatives for clients like Office Depot and J. Crew.

• Convergys hires home-based call center agents who provide support in customer service, and also supplies sales agents or help desk staff for companies.

• Extended Presence provides their clients with outbound sales agents and marketing support staff who work from home.

• Internet Girl Friday provides information technology support as well as administrative services for clients nationwide.

• LiveOps provides customer service support for a variety of major corporations.

• Spheris provides support to medical professionals. Their services include medical transcription and clinical documentation.

• Staffcentrix supplies virtual assistants for business clients, including CEOs and upper management of major corporations.

• VIPDesk provides call center support and also offers a home-based concierge service to clients.

• Voicelog provides representatives to perform verifications for transactions done online or by telephone. Many states require changes to telephone service and other remote transactions to be verified by a third party, which VoiceLog provides.

• West At Home also hires home-based customer service agents. They cater to a specific range of industries, specializing in health care and pharmaceutical support, as well as the hospitality industry.

Employees need to meet some basic requirements, including having a telephone and access to a PC. Although the work is conducted from home, interviews for the job aren't always done remotely.

Working at home is a growing and legitimate opportunity, but workers should still beware of any job that asks you to invest money, provide access to a bank account or give up a great deal of personal information up front. These are indicators of a possible scam.

Traditional companies with home-based workers

Some traditional companies also have home-based workers in the mix as part of their overall staffing strategies. Companies as diverse as American Airlines, TDS Telecom, 1-800-FLOWERS, Sprint and Xerox have programs that enable traditional workers to transition to telecommuting or hire workers specifically to work at home.

Aetna is one of the companies that has developed and implemented such a program. "Our telework program started as a grassroots initiative to keep talented employees when there were site consolidations," Aetna Telework Program head Eileen Levin explains.

The program, which started only a few years ago, has become very popular with employees. Levin notes that since the inception of the program, participation has jumped 300 percent. Around 10,000 Aetna employees, or 27 percent of the company's work force, now work from home.

Levin says that the company looks at several factors before transitioning a job or task to be done at home. Aetna ensures that the employee is an appropriate candidate to work at home. It also confirms that the home office is a stable, business-friendly environment. And most importantly, Aetna carefully considers whether the job is an appropriate choice to be performed by home-based workers.

Children's Healthcare of Atlanta is another company that is mixing traditional workers with employees who work from home. These home-based employees include medical transcriptionists and nurses who operate the hospital's Advice Line, a hotline where Laurie Peterson, one of the Advice Line nurses, has been working for CHOA from home for 11 years. She takes calls that vary from minor questions to emergency situations, and provides callers with a recommended course of action based on their conversations.

Peterson says, "I really enjoy being able to use my nursing judgment and experience right here in the convenience of my own home. We get inquiries from people both locally and all over the world seeking help with their child's health problems. At the end of a shift, it's very fulfilling for me to know I've helped allay a parent's fears."

If you're a worker who wants to transition from commuting to the office to working at home, talk to your company. Think about these discussion points before approaching your boss:

• Talk to the company about how offering this option to you and other employees will benefit them. Money talks, so be sure to refer to any potential savings the company will see by implementing this program. With gas prices at a record high, you should also underscore your savings, as well as the environmental benefits of working from home.

• Not every job or every process can be done from home, so be ready with a plan. Identify jobs and transactions at the company that can be done easily, safely and securely from home.

Despite the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Richard Fuld can still negotiate a deal. For example: taking home $20 million on $13.5 million worth of sold art.

The global mass media change a lot of things, but regional identity probably isn't one of them.

It's been nearly 50 years since Marshall McLuhan coined the term "global village" to describe the shared (if largely vicarious) experience that television and other electronic media were fast creating. One of the foundational principles of the global village--which, of course, the Internet has expanded by some vast multiple--is that electronic media doesn't just serve people; it changes people.

As more people communicate over greater distances, goes the theory, the less important are geographic regions as unique repositories of ideas, languages and moral sensibilities--in a word, culture. If so, the cultural differences once assumed to distinguish, say, New Yorkers from Texas farmers should become increasingly vestigial artifacts of a pre-Google world.

But if freedom from geographic constraints means liberation from regional identity, why do many Americans still think in terms of the Midwest vote, Southern conservatism, urban this and rural that? If the entire globe is connected to the same cultural mother ship--drinking the same Starbucks, driving the same cars, using the same search engines, watching the same CNN--how is it that one can still identify regional politics, tastes, values, idioms--the very substance of identity? Were the prophets of convergence wrong?

One argument in their favor is that convergence simply hasn't had enough time-- the global village, after all, is still a new entity by historical standards. You don't have to believe in "the end of history" to recognize how much more alike, at least superficially, far-flung places are today than 100 years ago.

Consumerism, once thought of as a uniquely American phenomenon, is now a staple of life from Kuala Lumpur to Santiago. Drive down a highway anywhere in the U.S., and the first thing that strikes you is how alike every place looks--the same strip malls, the same visual clutter, the same boxy office buildings, whether you're in New Hampshire or New Mexico. (The architectural vernaculars that once distinguished regions from each other are now largely quaint, secondary relics preserved by self-conscious historical societies.)

An American visiting Bangkok, Thailand, 100 years ago would have been struck primarily by its otherness. Today he's struck by its sameness--the same consumer products, the same cars, even the same language (English is common there) as back in Houston. Project the arc of convergence out a few decades, and it's not hard to see regional origin being relegated to a rather minor component of personal identity.

Of course, the world is not a linear equation, and there are forces working to resist the trend. Proximity is surely one of them. There is a whole academic discipline that says, in effect, that you are who you know. So-called "social impact theory" holds that the stronger and more immediate your relationships, the more likely you are to adopt your friends' values, regardless of what else you might read, watch or hear.

Sociologist Sherry Turkle on digital infatuations, Google and the iPhone

Do you love your cellphone? Your laptop? And--be honest now--did you ever expect to have an emotional relationship with a gadget?

Sherry Turkle figured you would. Turkle, a psychoanalytically-trained sociologist and psychologist who teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has spent decades studying technology's effect on relationships and one's sense of self. Her favorite mantra: We think with objects we love. We love objects we think with.

Her most recent book, The Inner History of Devices, is a collection of memoirs, ethnographies and clinical cases that examine the strong attachments that people form with technology and gadgets. Stories about those who view the world through a prosthetic eye, a young woman passionately attached to a particular ringtone, devotees of the tech site Slashdot.org or video-poker addicts all carry lessons about the role of technology in society.

Forbes.com spoke with Turkle about her recent work with teens and cellphones, the role that technology played in the recent presidential election and whether Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) really is making us stupid.

Forbes.com: This is your sixth book and one of three that examine the intense associations people have with devices. Where does The Inner History fit in

Sherry Turkle: I've been studying computers and technology since 1976. Computers are evocative objects. People become wedded to their MacBooks. I wanted to make the point that this connection, this sense that your life and well-being is enmeshed in technology, isn't just for computers.

This is really a methodology book. I tried to create something that would put people in the right state of mind to do this kind of work. I call it intimate ethnography--a combination of participant observation with a clinician's tradition of listening and the kind of intimacy you get from memoir.