Flexible Lives: Spatial, Temporal, and Behavioural Boundaries in a Fluid World of Work and Home

Abstract

The world of work and home has become increasingly fluid (Bauman 2000), due to an increase in flexible working. Work has become decoupled from time and space (Gajendran and Harrison 2007), making it increasingly common for knowledge-based workers to work at different times and in multiple spaces across a working day or week (Duxbury et al. 2014; Sewell and Taskin 2015; Kingma 2016). The Covid-19 pandemic in particular has been a catalyst for questioning accepted norms of where, when, and how work takes place and has encouraged many to experiment with new ways of working at spatio-temporal distance from a regular workplace (Gandini and Garavaglia 2023). This reshaping of traditional modes of working has had a significant effect on working patterns, social workplace interactions, personal relationships, and the boundaries between familial and working lives, which we seek to explore in this Special Issue.