Home at Work or Work at Home? On the Understanding and Dynamics of Border Areas during a Pandemic

Abstract

The article examines some of the findings of a qualitative research project that looked into the issue of daily “boundary work” as experienced by working adults with and without children during the COVID-19 pandemic. We define boundary work as work that occurs at the intersection of two domains: work and life. We concentrate on border locations in the context of two major issues: first, how people identify borders (boundary identity), and second, what individual coping strategies (cognitive and emotional boundary work) were produced by the pandemic. Because of the frequent spatial overlap between the two spheres (work and life), temporal and spatial boundaries became ineffective, and the majority of the labor of creating borders was moved to mental and emotional levels.