ABSTRACT
A satisfactory work–home balance in journalism is valuable for employees and organisations but for citizens as well because the work of journalists in a democracy is vital in terms of keeping the public informed and shaping public debate. Drawing on boundary theory, this study aims to examine how precariously employed journalists manage their role boundaries as they negotiate their work and home life demands. In-depth interviews conducted in 2017 and 2021 allowed us to obtain a longitudinal perspective on boundary work and to detect the tactics to create and maintain the preferred work-home role boundaries. The results show that work comes first with respect to the work–home balance in journalism. In the early years of their career, immersed in a labour-of-love ethic, journalists preferred to integrate work–home boundaries by being journalists 24 hours a day. Over time, a preference for the segmentation of work–home roles emerged along with different boundary work tactics. However, it is often impossible to segment boundaries due to the nature of the profession, and thus many of them leave the profession for public relations. The study makes an original contribution by adding a new boundary work tactic to the previously established typology.
1. Introduction
Individuals’ work and home lives are intertwined and inevitably influence each other (Allen et al., Citation2014; Kanter, Citation1977). This means a satisfactory work–home balance is a challenge for employees and organisations (Barnett, Citation1998), holding many implications for individual and family functioning. The literature shows that work–home conflict, defined as clashes between work and home demands (Kreiner et al., Citation2009, p. 704), affects an individual’s emotional exhaustion, depression, alcoholism, and lower statisfaction (Bedeian et al., Citation1988; Frone et al., Citation1997; Kossek & Ozeki, Citation1998) and is predictive of higher organisational turnover, absenteeism and lower performance (e.g. Anderson et al., Citation2002; Greenhaus et al., Citation2001).
In journalism, work–home conflict affects not only employees and organisations but also the public sphere and citizens. Journalists’ work is a vital part of democracy; it keeps the public informed, shapes public debate and reveals issues in the public interest (Deuze & Witschge, Citation2018). Poor performance of a journalists’ work can lead to a less informed public and weaker democratic activities (Čehovin Zajc & Poler Kovačič, Citation2021). Hence, in journalism, a satisfactory work–home balance is of interest not only for employees but for citizens as well.
To gain insight into the work–home balance of journalists, we draw on boundary management theory, which considers the ways individuals create, maintain or change boundaries to navigate the world around them (Ashforth et al., Citation2000). It can be examined from the perspective of an individual, such as which tactics individuals use to manage their work and home roles, and from an organisational perspective, which entails policies like flexible work. Kreiner et al. (Citation2009) noted that considerably more attention has been paid to organisational-level policies for managing work and home than individual-level processes. Accordingly, this study is concerned with individual perspectives. The study aims to better understand the preferences for work–home role boundaries and the tactics precarious journalists in Slovenia use to achieve their preferred role boundaries.
Below, we present the Slovenian journalistic context and theoretical background. In the empirical part, we outline the original contribution made by this paper, namely, adding a fifth tactic to the existing (Allen et al., Citation2021; Kreiner et al., Citation2009) typology of boundary work tactics.
1.1. Journalism in Slovenia
The rise of precarious employment, poor working conditions for journalists and risks to media pluralism characterise all European Union member and candidate states, with Slovenian media being no exception (Milosavljevic & Biljak Gerjevic, Citation2021). Since the 1990s, Slovenian journalism has undergone privatisation, commercialisation, labour-cost pressures and technological changes (Ignjatović & Kanjuo Mrčela, Citation2016, p. 93). These structural changes led to a rise in flexible employment relationships with precarious dimensions. In Slovenia, one-third of journalists work without a permanent work contract and thus without legal and social security.
Precariousness is found especially among generations born in the middle of the 1980s and 1990s (Čeferin et al., Citation2017; Ule, Citation2016). ‘[M]aintaining various kinds of freelance, informal and otherwise contingent temporary work arrangements are normal managerial practices / … /where younger newsworkers and newcomers comply with precarious labour relations and diminishing labour rights’ (Vobič & Slaček Brlek, Citation2014, p. 32). Precariousness affects journalistic content and imperils the watchdog role of news media. Legal scholars claim it is state authorities that must actively ensure the conditions for the work of a free media (Čeferin et al., Citation2017). However, no government has regulated the area of journalistic precarisation in Slovenia thus far. The moderate and liberal governments of Slovenia took a laissez-faire approach to journalism at best while right-wing governments quite a ‘stepmotherly’ approach to journalism – they even avoided their obligation to provide funding for the salaries of journalists and the operations of the Slovenian Press Agency.
1.2. Boundary management: segmenting or integrating work–home roles
Boundary management research focuses on the conflict between different socially constructed domains. The terms used to describe and examine boundary management among opposing domains are inconsistent, e.g. work–family (Clark, Citation2000), work–nonwork (Casper et al., Citation2018), work–life (Visser et al., Citation2016), work–home (Kreiner et al., Citation2009). In this study, we use work–home as it allows us to cast a ‘wider net and include a broader array of individuals and life circumstances’ (Kreiner et al., Citation2009, p. 704). In her study on work–home relations, Nippert-Eng (Citation1996) outlined how boundary theory can provide a lens for understanding the interface between work and home. It focuses on how people create, maintain or change boundaries to classify the world around them and for transition across roles (Ashforth et al., Citation2000). Some roles are more relevant in specific physical locations and at certain times. The family role is more likely to be performed at home on the weekend while the employee role on weekdays. A role is bound in space and time, typically associated with a specific social domain and thus has role boundaries (Ashforth et al., Citation2000, p. 486).
Role boundaries can vary from being highly segmented, where each role has a strict location and time, to highly integrated, where multiple roles can occur at the exact location and time (ibid.). Due to considerable boundary flexibility and permeability, transitions between integrated roles are frequent and unpredictable (ibid., 497). The boundary between roles is distinct at complete segmentation, with no conceptual, physical or temporal overlap and no similarity between contexts (ibid., 476). Role boundaries can be considered in terms of personal preferences, actual behaviours enacted by individuals, and the environmental conditions that facilitate segmentation and integration (Allen et al., Citation2021). First, we consider integration–segmentation in terms of preferences held by precariously employed journalists. The study is based on two waves of data, which is a valuable contribution ‘as there is little data available concerning how stable or how dynamic work–nonwork balance is across time’ (Allen et al., Citation2021; Casper et al., Citation2018). Therefore, we posit the first research question: RQ1: Which are the integration–segmentation preferences concerning the role boundaries of precariously employed journalists over a longer time span?
1.3. Boundary work tactics
Individuals can enact various strategies and create contextual conditions that help them manage boundaries in a way that is in line with their personal preferences (Allen et al., Citation2021; Kossek, Citation2016; Kossek & Lautsch, Citation2012; Kreiner et al., Citation2009). In her qualitative study of laboratory workers, Nippert-Eng (Citation1996) identified several behavioural manifestations of how people would either segment or integrate their work and home lives. Individuals who prefer the segmentation of boundaries (called ‘segmenters’) kept separate calendars for their work and home activities and/or kept two different sets of keys one for each domain. In contrast, those who prefer the integration of boundaries (‘integrators’) would put work and home activities on a single calendar, have one set of keys for work and home, invite work friends home for dinner, keep family pictures on their desks at work etc. She coined the term ‘boundary work’ to describe how individuals construct or modify temporal, spatial and other boundaries that demarcate roles and defined it as the ‘strategies, principles and practices that we use to create, maintain and modify cultural categories’ (ibid., 7).
Building upon Nippert-Eng’s (Citation1996) notion of boundary work, Kreiner et al. (Citation2009) identified specific tactics individuals use to create their ideal level of work–home segmentation or integration. The authors proposed four categories of boundary work tactics: behavioural, temporal, physical and communication, with sub-categories in each.
Behavioural tactics are practices that involve using other people, e.g. getting help from others, leveraging technology, creating multiple email accounts, invoking triage, prioritising tasks from one domain, and allowing differential permeability such as choosing the specific aspects of work–home life that will and will not be permeable (Kreiner et al., Citation2009, p. 715). A recent study on working from home by Allen et al. (Citation2021) uncovered an additional subcategory of behavioural tactics: emulating the office routine that entails recreating the on-site office environment and the overall feeling of going to work.
Second, Kreiner et al. (Citation2009) suggest that individuals can choose temporal issues surrounding work, such as when and how much time to devote to it. Temporal tactics, strategies that deal with time and how individuals manipulate it, involve controlling work time, e.g. blocking off segments of time and finding respite, removing oneself from work/home demands for a significant amount of time (Kreiner et al., Citation2009, p. 719). Allen et al. (Citation2021) found two more subcategories for people who work from home: purposefully disconnecting (actively doing things to take one’s mind off work) and reducing the work and home overlap (working while family members are not around or are asleep to avoid distractions).
Physical tactics refer to adapting physical boundaries, such as manipulating physical space: erecting or dismantling barriers between work and home domains, creating or reducing physical distance, and managing physical artefacts, e.g. using tangible items to separate or blend aspects of each domain. Physical boundaries might be a wall, a commute distance, a window etc. (p. 721).
Communication tactics include setting expectations and confronting violators. The former includes setting expectations like informing others about expectations in advance of boundary violations. The latter includes telling violators of boundaries during or after the boundary violation (p. 722).
After considering segmentation/integration in terms of personal preferences over a time span, we investigate the actual behaviours enacted by individuals. Despite growth of the work–home boundary literature (see Allen et al., Citation2014; Allen et al., Citation2021), little attention has been paid to the specific tactics individuals use to create and maintain their preferred boundaries between work and home. Further, Kreiner et al. (Citation2009, p. 726) noted that ‘future research could examine how tactics change over time’. Accordingly, we put forward the second research question: RQ2: Which boundary work tactics do journalists in precarious work arrangements employ to achieve their preferred role boundaries over time?
2. Method
In-depth semi-structured interviews with nine precarious journalists from Slovenian national news media organisations were conducted in 2017 and 2021 (see Table ). Altogether, we obtained 18 interviews. The longitudinal study presents a unique insight into journalists’ work–life balance and boundary management because it follows them through 4 years of their career. Respondents were chosen with a combination of the methods of snowball and expert sampling. Several consultations with academic media/journalism experts and journalists from media platforms were made before the final selection. Respondents were selected using the key criteria of precarious employment as recognised in previous literature: unpredictable work or insecure continuity of employment (ILO, Citation2016, p. 18; Kalleberg, Citation2009, p. 2); minimal control of working conditions, wages or the place of work (ILO, Citation2016, p. 18); work unprotected by law or collective agreements (ILO, Citation2016), no or limited social benefits and statutory entitlements (Kalleberg, Citation2013, p. 700; Standing, Citation2016, p. 41). As the risks of precariousness are considerably higher in atypical forms of employment (albeit standard employment is not free of them) (ILO, Citation2016; Keller & Seifert, Citation2013, p. 466; ), long-term atypical work was another selection criterion for respondents. The number of respondents was determined by theoretical saturation, i.e. when no additional data could inform our category as similar instances kept repeatedly emerging (Glaser & Strauss, Citation1967). Seven interviewees were female and two were male.
A common characteristic was revealed when conducting the in-depth interviews with precarious journalists: they all belong to the millennial generation. Ranging between 47 and 76 min in length, the interviews were transcribed and coded. We asked a wide range of questions to gain insights into their employment history, struggles to improve their working conditions, the motivational and affective factors, and their work–home boundary management. All participants were given pseudonyms to protect their privacy and all answers are written in the masculine form regardless of an interviewee's gender to protect their identities and allow them to speak freely. All respondents were highly educated – they held either bachelor or master’s degrees and started their careers as student interns and continued to work in atypical arrangements (copyright agreements, or self-employed) mainly for one media house, only one was working as a freelancer for various media houses. The nature of their work enabled them to work from various locations, i.e. the newsroom, field or work from home; even from abroad when taking a vacation (see ).
Table 1. Respondents’ profile.
3. Results
3.1. Journalists’ preferences concerning role boundaries: from integrators to segmenters
The results show the integration–segmentation preferences for precarious journalists’ role boundaries have changed over time. At the start of the career, they preferred work-to-home integration of role boundaries due to the nature of the journalistic profession, their love for and dedication to the work, and economic dependence. Years later, the precarious conditions remain, however a preference for the segmentation of role boundaries has emerged since some became parents, some experienced health issues, while others simply changed their perspective on work while becoming older.
3.1.1. Started as integrators
In 2017, the majority of respondents had no caring responsibilities for a child or elderly person, just two had a newborn baby each. The context of not having a family was described as an advantage that enables them to integrate their role boundaries completely in favour of work: ‘The majority in my editorial office was young. No one was a parent; we were free, without a family, with a lot of free time. Work is very unpredictable. On some days, there is so much work to do, so it's better that I don't have fixed things in my private life’ (Blake).
Respondents preferred role boundaries to be flexible, permeable and weak in favour of their professional role as journalists. All respondents discussed how the profession takes up most of their time: ‘If you want to be a good journalist, you have to live in this profession 24 h a day’ (Daniel). Their working hours and irregular and inconsistent time schedules called for flexible boundaries between work and home roles. Their typical work lasted the whole day and outside normal business hours: ‘The work schedule was loose. In journalism, you are available 24 h a day, on weekends, on holidays. Well, this is the basis of journalism, and if you do not agree to that, then you have nothing to do in journalism’. Therefore, their integration preference derived from the nature of the journalistic profession that requires constant availability: ‘I completely accepted the fact that just as a doctor must be available on Saturdays and Sundays, so it is in journalism’ (Daniel). Henry explained both that one cannot exit their professional role as a journalist and his motivations to excel in the profession: ‘It is a noble profession and I am willing to do anything to be a good journalist. Even to my own detriment / … / You have to put in the effort, / … / You're a journalist 24 h a day, not 8 h, and after that, you go home’.
They were all highly dedicated to the journalistic profession and intrinsically motivated to perform their work at their best, which also contributed to their preference for integration: ‘My goal is to dedicate myself to this work to the maximum because only from this can good results worthy of journalism emerge’ (Blake). Second, their preferences for work-to-home integration derived from the love of their work: ‘Journalism gives me everything, joy, fulfilment of dreams, an opportunity to express myself / … / it makes me happy’ (Connor). Love of their work motivated them to work most of the time: ‘After all, journalism is a job and it is free time. I don’t see any essential dividing line between leisure and journalism. After all, if you are a journalist, you are a journalist all the time. And when you do something with joy, it’s like a kind of free time’ (Daniel). They liked their job and perceived their work as free-time: ‘I think it is a great way of life to allow work to become your free time’ (Ian).
Apart from the nature of journalistic work and fascination with their work, respondents attributed their preference for the integration of role boundaries into precarious employment and the associated financial pressures. Henry shared: ‘As a freelancer, you get an opportunity, and you take it even though you already work 9 h a day. You can't miss it because of financial pressures. Then you work 10, 11, 12 hours a day’. Their inclination to integrate their role boundaries also arose from precarious types of work arrangements: ‘As precariously employed / … / I don't know what it looks like if you go on vacation, and it's not tied to work’ (Ethan). Precarity, along with the nature of the journalistic profession, demands flexibility to adjust to changing working obligations: ‘They demanded flexibility and I adapted to them because this was my job and my only source of income’. Due to the precarious nature of journalism (long workdays and constant availability), starting a family became a huge obstacle for journalists and their employers. When Franklin and George had their first new-borns, their working conditions worsened. George received fewer work tasks and thus a lower income, Franklin did not receive a promised full-time work contract when he informed the employer he would be becoming a parent.
3.1.2. Continuing as segmenters
Four years later, journalists’ role boundary preferences changed as they started to prefer segmentation. Respondents transitioned from young students with minimal financial needs and no caring responsibilities to adults with more complex and demanding needs and preferences. Three of them had become parents; Blake for the first time, and George and Franklin of second children. Yet, the precarious working conditions in journalism remained. Their family role had impacted their work–home preferences since being a parent had become incongruent with the journalistic profession: ‘The way I lived and worked until the birth of the child, it will no longer be possible. I have to organise my work and free time much better, which used to be almost entirely in favour of work’ (Franklin).
Two respondents had experienced health issues that had contributed to them changing their preferences: ‘After 13 years in journalism, I was not willing to work overtime at the expense of my health anymore / … / The older you get, the more you start to wonder whether it's worth it being only a journalist’ (Connor) and perceived permeable boundaries differently: ‘Many times I worked with a high fever, a sore throat because the editor counts on you / … / My work simply became a giant parasite’ (Ian).
It was not only health or family reasons influencing changes in work–home boundary preferences. Some journalists’ family and health situations had stayed the same, yet preferences for segmented role boundaries had emerged. They had started to appreciate their private life and free time and were unwilling to integrate their work and home roles anymore. For example, Andrew, who in 2017 loved journalism so much that he dedicated most of his time to journalism, later on changed his preferences regarding role boundaries: ‘It became clear to me that I was overwhelmed in such a rhythm that I would not be able to work in such a rhythm forever and free time was also important to me and I did not want to live for a job anymore’.
3.2. Journalists’ boundary work tactics
This section presents how journalists have managed boundaries by focusing on specific tactics. With the change in preferences concerning work–home role boundaries, boundary work tactics changed respectively.
3.2.1. Tactics for the integration of role boundaries
To integrate their role boundaries, journalists employed two subcategories of behavioural tactics. The first is using other people. George shared his experience of taking his family to events he had to cover as a journalist and by doing so using other people to blend his work and home domains: ‘If I have to cover an event, which mostly happens on weekends, I take my family with me, we go together’. Another behavioural tactic recognised among the interviewees is invoking triage, meaning prioritising urgent and important work and home demands. Journalists prioritised tasks for their work over their leisure time: ‘Free time was completely subordinated to work. If I had to finish something or they called me at some impossible hour or whatever, my free time could wait’ (Franklin).
All three subcategories of physical tactics were also found to integrate work and home roles. The first subcategory is adapting physical boundaries, which means erecting or dismantling physical borders or barriers between one’s work and home domains. By working from home, they dismantled the physical borders between their work and home roles: ‘You can do something from home or during the weekend; flexibility of work is great, which is an advantage in some respects. There is also some self-discipline and self-organisation needed’ (Franklin). The second subcategory is manipulating physical space – creating or reducing physical distance between work and home. They did so by creating no physical distance between their work and home roles due to the nature of their profession. As Connor explained: ‘Even if I came home at five, I couldn't calm down, relax, and unwind because I like to check everything 26 times’. The third subcategory is manipulating physical artefacts by using tangible items to separate or blend aspects of each domain. Andrew used a computer to blend his role boundaries between work and home: ‘It was already the case that on a birthday I wrote something and withdrew for an hour or two or that I had to watch an event on TV or call someone, do a phone interview’.
It should be noted that physical tactics somewhat overlap with temporal ones. Working from home in the evenings, on weekends or vacations could be understood as the deployment of temporal tactics as well as the use of physical tactics for the integration of work–home roles.
An additional tactic not recognised in the literature was found in our study. The authors of this paper discussed the newly identified category and classified it as a psychological tactic. Precarious working conditions and the very nature of journalism demanded the considerable integration of role boundaries. Integration made it difficult, if not impossible, to become psychologically disengaged from the role of a journalist. Hence, the journalists in our sample employed psychological tactics to avoid the difficulty of psychologically disengaging from the role of a journalist.
The psychological boundary work tactic is underpinned by a labour-of-love ethic. While speaking about the nature of journalistic work, they added their fascination with journalism: ‘Because journalism completely fascinates me, I dedicate most of the day to it’ (Andrew) and the fulfilment of their dreamwork: ‘I have always dreamed that this profession is something wonderful’ (Daniel). Psychological tactics for integrating work–home roles are embedded in the discourse about love for one’s work: ‘I can easily estimate the workload, my joy of work and enthusiasm resulted in 10–12 h of work per day’ (Ian). Together, all the interviewees seemed to suggest fascination, love, joy and passion for their work and craft, which led to the integration of work–home roles in favour of work. Ian offered a vibrant picture of blurred boundaries between work and home and how he, in the name of love for his chosen career, subordinated his free time to perform better journalistic work: ‘Work is your free time. I thought there must be a dividing line for a while, but if you like doing something, everything is subordinated to it. / … / If you love work, you love it for the rest of your life’.
3.2.2. Tactics for the segmentation of role boundaries
The results of our study show that journalists’ preferences concerning their role boundaries had changed 4 years later. Hence, the respondents had started to use boundary work tactics not to integrate boundaries between their work and home roles as was the case at the start of their career, but to segment their work and home roles. To this end, they were mainly using temporal and communicative tactics.
Daniel shared his experience of using temporal tactics to achieve the segmentation of role boundaries, particularly for finding respite: ‘You finish one article and then you have to finish another and you are in a constant movement. Above all, it is essential to turn your head off from all of this. And you can do that while on vacation’. Despite deploying boundary work tactics to segment his work and home domains, he still reported blurred boundaries between his roles:
When you are in journalism, you go on vacation for 2 weeks and that doesn't mean it changes anything. I am interested in things, what is going on in society on vacation as well. I can't imagine putting the phone in the wardrobe for 2 weeks and acting like nothing is happening around me.
Henry also employs temporal tactics to segment his work and home roles. He reported activities we classified as purposefully disconnecting since he reported actively doing things to take his mind off work: ‘I have a couple of hobbies that I try to stick to because then I can disconnect because I work mentally’. However, he also reported blurred boundaries between different roles: ‘Work and private life are mixed, everything melts into stress, it affects my interpersonal relationships’.
George employs temporal tactics, namely, reducing the work and home overlap by working while family members are not around to avoid distractions. He stated: ‘During the week, I work when the children are having a bath, and I write in between. Or the kids are playing outside and I'm working on the computer in the afternoons’ (George).
When George became a parent and a preference for the segmentation of roles emerged, he deployed communicative tactics to segment his work and home, confronting the violators of boundaries. He asked his editor for a more structured work schedule but was not successful at it, so he left the news media house:
I left the job myself; I had a feeling that the editor wanted me to go. In addition, I did not belong to the newsroom anymore because people of my age did not have children and were organising their week according to their activities. However, if you have children, this does not work anymore. I asked if my work schedule could be arranged to work one week in the morning, another week in the afternoon, and they said no.
Many respondents had left journalism because their profession had become incongruent with their preferred role boundaries. Hence, half the respondents changed their profession for public relations or similar corporate communications jobs. When asked to describe the situation in public relations compared to journalism, Andrew explained: ‘It is essential to me that I can balance work and leisure. When I come home from work, very rarely does anyone call me from work. My evenings are free, weekends are free, holidays are free’. He also drew attention to free time, which was impossible in journalism, yet exists in other professions:
I spend more of my time with the people I love and the things I love to do. This feeling that you have 2 days off after work, I am’ not trading that for anything anymore / … /. It is important that you like the job, that you take it as a mission and not an obligation, but that job should not be everything to you.
4. Main findings
Our study reveals that the integration/segmentation preferences for the work and home role boundaries of precarious journalists change over time. At the start of their career, their preference leaned towards integrated role boundaries in favour of work due to the nature of the journalistic profession, their love and dedication to journalism, and economic dependence. Over the time span, a preference for the segmentation of role boundaries emerged due to family or health reasons or simply by virtue of getting older. In time, the journalists employed various tactics to manage these boundaries in a way that aligned with their preferences. To integrate their role boundaries between work and home, the journalists deployed behavioural, physical and psychological tactics.
The latter is a distinct boundary work tactic detected in our study that is not recognised in the typology proposed by Kreiner et al. (Citation2009) and Allen et al. (Citation2021). Journalists had found it difficult to psychologically decouple their work and home roles. Hence, they engaged in social practices we identified as psychological tactics, rationalising the work–home role asymmetry with the argument that they love their work. This tactic helped them avoid the difficulty of psychological disengagement. We suppose this tactic can be found not only in the journalistic profession but also in other professions given that today the labour-of-love ethic has become all-pervasive. Thus, an original contribution made by this paper is the extension of the previous set of boundary tactics (see ) that can be used to either integrate or segment work–home roles.
Table 2. Extended typology of boundary work tactics for the integration or segmentation of work–home roles.
Over the time span, journalists deployed behavioural and temporal boundary work tactics to segment their work and home roles. In general, due to the nature of their work, journalists were not successful in segmenting the boundaries between their work and home as the role of watchdog requires constant availability, vigilance and immediate reactions to events (Boateng & Lauk, Citation2020). Consequently, half of them left the journalistic profession and started work in public relations or similar corporate communications jobs, which allowed them to segment their work and home boundaries.
5. Discussion and conclusion
This study examined precarious journalists’ preferences for work–home role boundaries and the tactics they use to create and maintain them. The results derived from two waves of data collection provided us with a longitudinal perspective. At the start, journalists wholeheartedly embraced the watchdog role and thus fully integrated their work and home role boundaries in favour of their work. To achieve integrated role boundaries, journalists employed behavioural and physical tactics. It should be noted that the physical tactics somewhat overlap with temporal ones in practice – working from home in the evenings, on weekends or vacations could be understood as the deployment of temporal tactics as well as the use of physical tactics for the integration of work–home roles.
In addition, we found traits that represent a distinct boundary work tactic, adding to the typology proposed by Kreiner et al. (Citation2009) and Allen et al. (Citation2021). Due to the considerable integration of role boundaries, journalists had found it difficult to psychologically decouple their work and home roles. They hence engaged in practices we have identified as psychological tactics, erecting or dismantling psychological borders and barriers between one’s work and home roles. These tactics were deployed to help journalists rationalise their long working hours and work–home asymmetry. A typical quote describing psychological boundary work tactics is: ‘Because journalism completely fascinates me, I dedicate most of the day to it’. Another is: ‘My joy of work and enthusiasm resulted in 10–12 h of work per day’.
The psychological boundary work tactic is underpinned by a labour-of-love ethic where workers are ‘cheery and flexible, networked, creative and caring. They love their work / … / their hours stretch long and the line between the home and the workplace blurs’ (Jaffe, Citation2021, p. 10). Work provides self-actualisation and individuals demonstrate a passion for their work (ibid.). Still, the passion in our case was shown through working long hours more than in expressions of emotion. Over the time span, journalists realised that work ‘won’t love them back, but other people will’ (Jaffe, p. 274). They started to prefer spending time with their families, partners and friends. For the segmentation of their role boundaries, journalists were employing different boundary work tactics from those they had relied on for integration. In this case, the psychological tactic was no longer helpful since one cannot create a psychological fence if they are doing what they love. For the segmentation of role boundaries, journalists used temporal tactics like vacations and communicative tactics. However, they were not successful because the role of watchdog requires constant availability, vigilance and immediate reactions to events (Boateng & Lauk, Citation2020).
Professions vary with regard to the extent they ensure conditions to facilitate integration or segmentation (Allen et al., Citation2021). The results suggest that the segmentation of work and home role boundaries is impossible in certain jobs like journalism, especially for daily newsworkers. Recall the cases of journalists whose working conditions worsened when they became parents. In the words of Saltzman (Citation2003): ‘The age-old dilemma of a career in journalism vs. a private life with family seems to still be unresolved since most successful journalists find that the only way to be a success is to work at it 24 h a day, leaving little or no time for personal relationships, marriage, parenting or anything else that takes time from the seemingly unending professional work’. Our finding that journalism does not allow for the segmentation of role boundaries holds practical implications on an individual, micro-level as it may help aspiring journalists decide whether they wish to pursue a career in a profession that requires constant availability and allows no work–home balance.
Our study also holds practical implications on a structural level. It is a common practice that journalists leave the profession for public relations or similar corporate communications jobs which permit them a better work–home balance and a more predictable work environment (Pickard, Citation2019). This was also established in our sample. The rising share of individuals crossing the border to what was once considered ‘the dark side’ (public relations) (Alterman, Citation2015) brings significant consequences for public welfare, the right to know and democracy in general as this directly or indirectly means a less informed public because there are fewer watchdogs monitoring the authorities and fewer revelations of corruption (Pickard, Citation2019). The newly discovered psychological boundary work tactic is a valuable theoretical extension to the boundary management literature as the emotional commitment of workers and the labour-of-love ethic remain under-researched topics (Jaffe, Citation2021). In addition, our study suggests it is productive to acknowledge precarity as a moderating factor while examining boundary management. Journalists in the sample pointed out that they had integrated boundaries not only because they loved their work but also because the precarious working conditions had impelled them to do so.
Despite achieving theoretical saturation, the main limitation of the paper is the small number of interviews and the context since the research was conducted on a sample of Slovenian journalists. However, the Slovenian journalistic context has similar characteristics to most European Union member states (Milosavljevic & Biljak Gerjevic, Citation2021) and thus the results could apply to other EU countries. Further, the personal context of each individual journalist is not to be underestimated. Future research could purposefully sample other professions, generations (baby boom and generation Z) and cultural contexts to make generational comparisons of work and home boundary management and to test boundary work tactics in different contexts.
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Acknowledgement
The authors would like to thank the respondents for sharing their experiences and confidential information. Just as importantly, the authors would like to thank prof. dr. Melita Poler Kovačič for initiating the research in 2017 and blind reviewers for relevant and constructive comments that significantly improved the article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Data availability
Transcripts of in-depth interviews are available by authors upon request.
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Additional information
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Notes on contributors
Tinca Lukan
Tinca Lukan is a junior researcher at the Centre for Organisational and Human Resources Research at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana. Her research interest includes sociology of work, economic sociology and work-life balance, and career paths, creative industry, journalism.
Jožica Čehovin Zajc
dr. Jožica Čehovin Zajc is an assistant professor and postdoctoral researcher, who researches at the Centre for Organisational and Human Resources Research, at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana and teaches methodological courses at the Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Ljubljana. Her research interest include sociology of work, working conditions, health of employees and communication studies.
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