Intimate Connections: The Impact of the Mobile Phone on Work/Life Boundaries

Abstract

If there is one single artifact that characterizes modern life in the fast lane it is the mobile phone. Both as a practice and a symbol, it epitomizes what it means to think about mobility and immobility today. As the mobile phone increasingly becomes a platform for mobile media, so too does it become the harbinger for debates around the convergence of work and personal life. Our intention here is to consider the impact of this iconic technology on work/life balance, which over the last decade has become a major area of social science investigation and policy debate. In the United States, for example, numerous studies measure what is referred to as "home-to-job and job-to-home spillover," whereby experiences in one domain moderate the experiences in the other. Spillover can be positive or negative, but most of the research has been on negative spillover, when demands from the two domains of job and home compete for an individual's time, energy, and attention. In Australia and Britain, organizational, government, and academic discourses favor the gender-neutral language of work/life balance or work/life integration, in contrast to earlier discourses of family-friendly policies. Whatever the language, the shared assumption is that the boundaries that once separated work and home life are increasingly permeable.