Managing collapsed boundaries in global work

Abstract

Global workers have long contended with the challenges of working across geographical, temporal, and cultural boundaries enabled by communication technologies. However, the global work research has rarely intersected with the literature on work–home boundary management—which has been brought to the forefront due to the forced move to remote work during the Covid-19 pandemic. Drawing on a qualitative field study of 55 in-depth interviews with global workers from a large organization headquartered in the Nordics, we found that global workers drew on sociomaterial affordances to manage both global work and work–home boundaries through strategies of boundary support and boundary collapse. Although the shift to remote work created challenges due to boundary collapse, it presented new spatiotemporal affordances that led to unexpected benefits for both global work and work–life boundary management. The findings have implications for global work, remote work, and the future of work more broadly.