Beyond work and life: constructing new domains in the digital age

Work-life balance (WLB) is a metaphor for resolving the temporal conflict as we struggle to deal with competing demands on our time from different domains, broadly conceptualised as ‘work’ and ‘life’. The concept of WLB has been widely criticised (e.g. Wapshott & Mallett, 2012) and contemporary use of digital technologies adds further complexity to this struggle (Duxbury, Higgins, Smart, & Stevenson, 2014). In this paper we focus on ‘switching’, a temporal event in which participants capture on video their real-time self-defined transitions between or within digital/physical domains, as a means of exploring how they construct the demarcations salient to them. We examine the construction of an ‘online’ domain (not limited to ‘work’ or ‘life’) and how participants negotiated and managed boundaries as they ‘switch’ between domains in their daily lives.