Hyper-separation as a tool for work/life balance: Commuting in academia

ABSTRACT

Given the declining number of tenure-track positions, the academic job market has become fiercely competitive, often forcing faculty to make difficult choices, including living apart from their partners and children. These individuals become commuting couples, neatly segmenting their professional and personal lives, and thus creating a hyper-separation between work and family. Using work/family border theory as an analytical lens, we draw on interviews with 36 participants who were members of commuting couples to explore how participants fared in this arrangement. Participants discussed how being separated both facilitated their professional productivity and deepened their personal relationships. In short, participants were engaged in an extreme form of work/life balance. We term this phenomenon the hyper-separation of roles, which serves as a mechanism to enact balance.

KEYWORDS:

• Work/life balance
• faculty
• commuting couples
• work/family border theory

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University at Buffalo Gender Institute.

Notes on contributors

Margaret W. Sallee

Margaret W. Sallee is Associate Professor and Higher Education Program Coordinator in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy at the University at Buffalo. Her research focuses on two broad areas: faculty work and the student experience. She uses a critical lens to examine the intersection of individual experiences and organizational culture to interrogate the ways in which gender and other social identities operate on college campuses. She has spent much of the past decade focusing on work/life balance and the ways in which institutional norms and culture shape parents’ experiences on and off-campus. She also is deeply interested in how gender affects individuals’ experiences and is particularly interested in the role that gender and masculinities play in men’s lives. Her research has been published in Journal of Higher Education, Review of Higher Education, Diversity in Higher Education, and the American Journal of Education along with a 2014 book Faculty Fathers, published by SUNY Press.

Danielle V. Lewis

Danielle V. Lewis is currently a doctoral student in higher education at the University at Buffalo. She also earned a B.A. in Political Science from SUNY Cortland and a M.Ed. from the University of South Carolina. Her research focuses on how majority populations successfully champion for underrepresented groups. She is currently examining this phenomenon among undergraduate men in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) disciplines and exploring how their support of women in STEM manifests within their academic areas. Danielle has also worked in a variety of roles across student affairs and currently works in an administrative position at the University at Buffalo.