Between you and me

Many professionals struggle with managing boundaries between work and life outside of work. For decades researchers have been trying to understand this issue but we still have much to learn about it. With my dissertation, I aim to improve our understanding of boundary work-the process though which people construct, negotiate, place, maintain and change boundaries between their work and personal life. I propose an agentic perspective of boundary work. In a qualitative, inductive study of 70 attorneys at a large law firm, I explore attorneys' subjective experiences of boundary work. I draw on boundary theory and take a social constructionist approach to learn about what individuals can do to manage their competing demands. My analysis reveals that boundary work takes place in the context of relationships and is fundamentally a relational process. When attorneys face incompatible work and non-work demands, they weigh their desire to meet their non-work demands against their ability to develop and maintain good relationships at work. This relational perspective presents a significant departure from previous research in work-life domain, which focused on organizational policies and culture, or on stable individual differences.