Boundary work tactics: Negotiating the work-home interface

We document how members of a particularly problematic occupation engage in boundary work to negotiate the demands between work and home life. Building upon Nippert-Eng's (1996) notion of "boundary work," we discovered and classified physical, behavioral, cognitive, and temporal tactics that subjects used to help create their ideal level of work-family segmentation. Our findings are based two qualitative studies with Episcopal priests. The first involved analysis of open-ended surveys of 220 priests, while the second involved detailed coding of hour-long interviews with 60 other priests. Our findings extend past theoretical and empirical work by demonstrating individuals' abilities to effectuate desired changes in their work-home balance.