Flexible lives: spatial, temporal, and behavioural boundaries in a fluid world of work and home

Abstract

The world of work and home has become increasingly fluid (Bauman 2000), due to an increase in flexible working. Work has become decoupled from time and space (Gajendran and Harrison 2007), making it increasingly common for knowledge-based workers to work at different times and in multiple spaces across a working day or week (Duxbury et al. 2014; Sewell and Taskin 2015; Kingma 2016). The Covid-19 pandemic in particular has been a catalyst for questioning accepted norms of where, when, and how work takes place and has encouragedmany to experiment with new ways of working at spatio-temporal distance from a regular workplace (Gandini and Garavaglia 2023). This reshaping of traditional modes of working has had a significant effect on working patterns, social workplace interactions, personal relationships, and the boundaries between familial and working lives, which we seek to explore in this Special Issue. For many years, an increase in flexible working has reshaped traditional modes of working, both infringing on traditional associations between a place of work and its content and reorienting the spatial, temporal, and behavioural boundaries between work and non-work (Ashforth, Kreiner, and Fugate 2000). According to Basile and Beauregard (2021), technology has played a central part in these changes as we ‘feel compelled to stay “switched on” to work’ (36). As a result, the use of time, space, and objects in demarcating the work-nonwork boundary has become more flexible and fluid (Reissner, Izak, and Hislop 2021; Izak, Shortt, and Case 2022) than traditionally assumed. During the Covid-19 pandemic, working from home crossed the work-nonwork boundary frequently to attend to both professional and family roles. Largely fixed work schedules commonly led to struggles to fulfil this multitude of commitments (Adisa et al. 2022). An increase in remote and hybrid forms of working, which has been associated with an increase of labour productivity (Office for National Statistics 2022), and which is bound to continue (World Economic Forum 2020), has further highlighted spatial, social, and temporal shifts in our understanding of community at work (Spinuzzi et al. 2019; Garrett, Spreitzer, and Bacevice 2017), as well as the embodied practices of workers (de Vaujany and Aroles 2019). Specifically, there has been a trend towards individualization of working patterns as a result of flexible working, which may weaken the fabric of social relationships at work (Ajzen and Taskin 2021). If excessive, this trend may affect our sense of belonging (Vine, this issue). However, if the right balance is achieved, individualization may increase the collaborative capabilities of many organizations by, for example, enabling speedier teamwork or supporting the facilitation of employees who feel less comfortable interacting during face-to-face meetings (Farragher 2022, 35). Yet this still changes the landscape for how and where we work in this Covid-emergent world. For example, many organizations have started re-thinking and re-writing their flexible working policies in light of the pandemic, whilst acknowledging how flexible working (particularly in relation to the choices we make about where we work) impacts employee well-being, health, those employees home-working in rural areas, those employees home-working whilst living with different generations (Chennangodu and Rajendra, this issue), and the different experiences of men and women (Marra 2023).