‘Chained to my work'? Strategies to manage temporal and physical boundaries among self‐employed teleworkers

• Date: 01 November 2013
• Author: Michael Gold,Mona Mustafa
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1748-8583.12009
• Published date: 01 November 2013

‘Chained to my work’? Strategies to manage

temporal and physical boundaries among

self-employed teleworkers

Mona Mustafa, Faculty of Business and Management, University of Wollongong

Dubai

Michael Gold, School of Management, Royal Holloway University of London

Human Resource Management Journal, Vol 23, no 4, 2013, pages 413–429

It is accepted that teleworkers generally manage the balance between their home and working lives by

establishing temporal and physical boundaries between the two along a continuum of role

integration–segmentation. What is less understood is the nature of the relationship between temporal and

physical boundaries, and how teleworkers control constituent elements of physical boundaries to secure

their preferred location along the continuum. Based on 20 interviews with self-employed teleworkers, this

article examines the ways in which successful control of time depends largely on the successful control

of space. It investigates in particular how teleworkers attempt to control space by breaking it down into

constituent elements involving equipment, activities and ambiance.

Contact: Dr Mona Mustafa, Faculty of Business and Management, Wollongong University in

Dubai, Knowledge Village, Block 15, P.O. Box 20183, Dubai. Email: monamustafa@

uowdubai.ac.ae

INTRODUCTION

One of the principal challenges facing the home-working self-employed is how to

manage the boundaries between work and home. This article examines the ways in

which the home-working self-employed with a portfolio of clients manage flexibility

and establish appropriate boundaries, focusing on those who use information and

communications technology as an integral part of their work and are generally referred to as

‘teleworkers’ (ILO, 1990; Blanpain, 1997).

Studies of boundary management among teleworkers (such as Mirchandani, 1998; Felstead

et al., 2005; Halford, 2006; Kylin and Karlsson, 2008) generally discuss those who are employed,

that is, individuals who normally commute to work for paid employment in an organisation but

who reach an understanding with their employer to carry out a proportion of their responsi-

bilities through home-based telework. Employed and self-employed teleworkers do, of course,

face certain boundary challenges in common. For example, they both have to ensure that they

have adequate office space at home in which to work, and they both need to find ways to start

and finish the working day and handle break times and interruptions (although the employed

may attempt to replicate the framework of office hours to which they are accustomed).

Nevertheless, there are also major differences between them that stem principally from the

nature of employed or self-employed status. While employed teleworkers are still generally

involved in occasional commuting to work and their workflow is regulated and supervised

externally by their organisation (Dimitrova, 2003), self-employed teleworkers face complicating

factors because they are responsible for their own workflows: they need to attract and retain

clients, juggle a range of competing commitments, meet deadlines, invoice and monitor

payments, manage irregularities in the arrival of work, network and so on.

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doi: 10.1111/1748-8583.12009

HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT JOURNAL, VOL 23 NO 4, 2013 413

© 2012 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Please cite this article in press as: Mustafa, M. and Gold, M. (2013) “‘Chained to my work’? Strategies to manage temporal and physical boundaries

among self-employed teleworkers”. Human Resource Management Journal 23: 4, 413–429.

In particular, the volume of work that self-employed teleworkers have on hand at any

moment has a significant impact on whether they feel able to maintain their temporal

boundaries, and its regularity or irregularity affects their ability to control working hours.

Although they are technically in a position either to accept or turn down work, maintaining a

consistent workflow is not something they can control. As demonstrated later in this article,

many self-employed teleworkers feel that they have to check new work requests as they come

in and answer emails promptly if their business is to thrive.

These additional workflow factors therefore complicate the lives of self-employed

teleworkers (as opposed to their employed counterparts) and exert a substantial impact on their

time management as they attempt to handle two different boundaries – temporal and physical

– at the same time. Indeed, in one of the few studies to examine time management by

self-employed teleworkers, Osnowitz (2005: 85) notes that for them, ‘temporal boundaries

require special vigilance’. If the advantages of flexibility are to outweigh the disadvantages,

then effective strategies for managing boundaries are essential. We therefore pose two research

questions in this article to help unravel the relationship between temporal and physical

boundaries and to investigate the constituent elements of physical boundaries in greater detail.

Our first question examines the relationship between temporal and physical boundaries, and

particularly whether the successful control of time depends on the successful control of space.

We argue that these boundaries, which are often presented as a set of constraints of equal

standing, actually have a structured relationship and that failure to manage physical

boundaries is likely to lead to problems in managing temporal boundaries.

Our second question, which flows out of the first, examines the nature of the tactics that

self-employed teleworkers develop to control space, and particularly how they break physical

boundaries down into elements involving equipment, activities and work ambiance in order to

manage the requirements of working from home.

MANAGING BOUNDARIES

Understanding how self-employed teleworkers create boundaries helps to shed light on the

ways in which they cope with the potential role conflict associated with working from home.

A boundary in this context may be defined as ‘a structural phenomenon that involves spatial,

temporal, psychological and social separation between work and family life’ (Standen et al.,

1999, in Hartig et al., 2007: 236).

Individuals create boundaries, described by Zerubavel (1991: 2) as ‘mental fences’, around

different roles to help simplify the environment and maintain order. Some maintain strong

boundaries between work and home domains in an attempt to keep them separate, but others

form boundaries that allow a degree of integration between the two domains (Nippert-Eng,

1996). Such boundaries are characterised by permeability and flexibility:

‘[Permeability] relates to being physically located in one domain, but actually

behaviourally responding to the other domain. For example, a work boundary is

permeable if the employee is contacted by family while at work . . . A boundary is

flexible if it could be relaxed to meet the demands of the other domain, for example,

if the employee perceives that he or she could leave work to attend to a family

matter’ (Bulger et al., 2007: 367).

Boundary permeability and flexibility (referred to here together as ‘integration’) may allow a

smooth transition between the two domains of work and home, but the boundary becomes

blurred when, for example, an individual attempts to combine working with child care.

Teleworker strategies to manage boundaries

HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT JOURNAL, VOL 23 NO 4, 2013414

© 2012 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.