Boundary Management

Abstract

The everyday use of information and communication technology makes us available for our social contacts independent of time and place. This availability blurs the boundaries between life domains that might have been separate in the past. Boundary management is the planning and organisation of activities for regulating the availability within and across life domains. Here we present the results of a study on the boundary management of parents of pre-school children--- a group that intensively performs boundary management. We show that often a melange of clear boundary strategies and situative availability decisions is prevalent. The contribution is the identification of life domains, the classification of availability statuses, and the elaboration on ad-hoc availability in which clear boundaries and situative considerations collide.