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

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 encouraged many 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).

In other words, the fluidity of working patterns and social dynamics, such as the interplay between the formal and informal interactions between co-workers, have defined contemporary flexible working patterns (Blagoev, Costas, and Kärreman 2019). As a result, a work ecosystem involving different spaces that take on different roles for different modes of work is emerging, partially hastened by enforced homeworking during the Covid-19 lockdown and a wider social awareness of where and when we work and why. Indeed, over the past few years, we have witnessed the appropriation and re-appropriation of home spaces – dining rooms for working, living rooms for home-schooling, and streets for exercising (Shortt and Izak 2020). In the current climate, organizations may seek to re-design the office, given its changes in occupation. The flexibility of office space is now at the top of the agenda to support this new complex ecosystem of flexible workers and their needs. The workplace, as Procopi (2022) argues, needs to appeal to much wider audiences, as employee expectations shift in relation to wanting more flexible layouts, more welcoming spaces, and environments designed with well-being in mind. There is also exploration of how employers might assist with curating home-based workspaces or those workplaces ‘in-between’ (see, for example, Osmond 2022).

However, navigating this fluid world of work has been a precarious undertaking for many, particularly for those seeking to preserve a feasible work-life balance (Villadsen 2017). On the one hand, this is due to increasing workloads and work intruding the non-work domain (Beauregard, Basile, and Canónico 2019) as work becomes easily accessible through digital technologies. On the other hand, this is also due to what has been called an ‘autonomy paradox’, which explains that people who have more autonomy are more inclined to work longer hours (Evans, Kunda, and Barley 2004; Kelliher and Anderson 2010). These otherwise often hidden struggles have been brought into the fore by the Covid-19 pandemic.

These dynamics may render the understanding of new and various forms of ‘work flexibility’ a complex task. As argued by Izak (forthcoming), whilst flexibility is sometimes (and more so recently) hailed as a new panacea for numerous workplace issues and problems from health benefits to organizational resilience, this enormous span is a problem in itself. Different intentions and initiatives may be (and are) subsumed under the cloak of the benefits of flexibility, while often the subject of flexibility and its lived experience remain unclear (Bal and Izak 2021). Paradox is never far away when positive discourses on flexibility are in use (Izak forthcoming). For example, the benefits of flexibility at an organizational level (flexibility for the organization) may appear due to the introduction of employee flexibility measures (downsizing – flexibility of the employee). This, in turn, may at the same time be inversely correlated with the individual flexibility, e.g. working longer hours, and somehow portrayed as beneficial e.g. when new demanding and time-consuming work tasks are hyped as ‘empowering’ or ‘self-rewarding’.

In the current climate, we only need to look at the images and stories being shared on digital platforms to see how the work/ non-work boundaries are being experienced and managed (or not) by different types of workers. For example, the campaign on Instagram inviting small businesses to share images and descriptions of where they work, #yesthisismydesk, captures the very essence of liquidity and complexity that we seek to address in this special issue. These stories and images expose the stark reality of flexible working and the various ways in which people craft workspaces in the home, and how home life seeps back in. And it is in the issue we find the use of visual methods helps to ‘see’ home-working through the eyes of those experiencing the liquidity of work and home boundaries (Chennangodu and Rajendra, this issue). Indeed, the extraordinary life/work experiment enforced by the recent COVID-19 pandemic has encouraged us to rethink the ways in which we as employees, entrepreneurs, managers, and organizations organize work (Shortt and Izak 2020). The subsequent return to office-based working has posed additional challenges to people, organizations, and their workplaces and it is this that has raised further questions about what the office or workplace is for.

In this special issue, we are delighted to share five papers that address the wide, varied, and complex issues associated with flexible work and blurred boundaries in the Covid-emergent era. Each paper presents a novel and critical view of how flexible working is experienced and how technology, time, shift-work, gender, and cultural sensitives provide new perspectives for researchers and organizations to consider in our fluid working world. Our collection of papers, we hope, will enable readers to reflect on the precarity of flexible work in the UK (Vine), new work routines in Italy (Gandini and Garavaglia), shift working and fragmented work in Austria (Sardadvar and Reiter), the gender divide in flexible working in a Middle Eastern context (Rouhana and Mielly), and what home-working looks like in India when living and working in multi-generational homes (Chennangodu and Rajendra):

Tom Vine’s critical exploration of neoliberal post-bureaucratic organization’s proclivity to substitute physical presence in the formal workplace (office) – largely or entirely – with alternative forms, such as ‘homeworking, contracting, temping and self- employment’ renders problematic the achievement of ‘togetherness’ and bonding possible in the physical proximity of others – phenomenon which Vine after Durkheim calls ‘collective effervescence’. The alienating effects of its disappearance are convincingly argued on the basis of well pointed empirical reports, which add to the critical discussion of precarity in the context of fluid work.

Alessandro Gandini and Emma Garavaglia examine knowledge workers’ perceptions of remote working practices and their implications on their lives more widely during the first Covid-19 lockdown. The study was situated in Italy, which represents a context in which remote working was not widely used prior to the pandemic. The paper shows how the research participants adapted to the new yet enforced remote working arrangements through discovery of and experimentation with different ways of using the dimensions of time, technology, and social relations. Gandini and Garavaglia conclude that their research participants learned that ‘another work routine is possible’ despite experiencing a range of challenges and constraints.

Karin Sardadvar and Cornelia Reiter critically interrogate split shifts as an example of a flexible and fragmented working arrangement used for its potential to reduce labour costs. Drawing on qualitative interviews with home care workers in Austria, the paper examines how research participants experience the unpaid interruption (‘break’) between shifts. The analysis demonstrates that the time between shifts is neither experienced as free time nor as working time and consequently affects home care workers' wellbeing due to the high demands on their time. The study challenges the currently dominant linear understanding of work time in favour of more subjective experiences.

Lena Rouhana and Michelle Mielly’s study, set against the landscape of a multi-ethnic and multi-religious Middle Eastern context, focuses on the simultaneous increase in flexibility (typically temporal) and inflexibility (typically spatial) afforded by the pandemic, a phenomenon, which they conceptualize as ‘(in)flexible work’. In this paper, work-related social imaginaries, i.e., aspirational organizational images and fantasies such as ultimate ‘freedom’ or ‘autonomy’ – representations which drive the organizations and organizing – are explored to explain the role of (in)flexible work scenarios in shaping the social imaginaries in gender-sensitive ways. This in turn affects future career trajectories, the occurrence which potentially further perpetuates the gender divide in the context of lofty ideals of flexible work, but also increases the latters’ capacity to mislead.

Rajeshwari Chennangodu and Advaita Rajendra explore home-working and the complexities surrounding work and unpaid care work during and after the Covid-19 pandemic in rural India. Their autoethnographic paper uses narrative reflections and visual methods to examine how the (re) organization of work boundaries were experienced in the home, whilst considering the gender and caste dynamics felt by the authors. The paper interrogates the assumptions and tensions within the home-based workspace and the challenges faced when making and negotiating spatial, temporal, and behavioural boundaries.

We hope that the content of this Special Issue will provide a useful reflection on and the reference point for the ongoing exploration of shifting spatial, temporal, and behavioural boundaries in a fluid world of work and home.