How do lifestyle hospitality and tourism entrepreneurs manage their work-life balance?

Abstract

This study uses border theory to explore how lifestyle hospitality and tourism entrepreneurs manage their work-life balance. This research utilizes in-depth interviews and observations from Dali and Lijiang, China. Three types of findings emerged. First, for lifestyle entrepreneurs, work and personal life are not divided; business is considered a style of living, not work. Second, lifestyle entrepreneurs’ boundary management tactics include temporal tactics, physical tactics, and psychological tactics. Third, the factors influencing the work-life balance of lifestyle entrepreneurs include personal factors and the contextual factors related to tourism destinations. This paper contributes to border theory by indicating how an individual’s psychological borders have a decisive effect on work-life balance perception, and how both the tourism and Chinese contexts moderate the psychological borders of work-life balance to some extent.