ECSCW gem nr.3

Submit your paper and visit us in Trondheim for deep discussions about CSCW as a research field! This week’s gem is the paper “From Work to Life and Back Again” by Luigina Ciolfi and Eleanor Lockley presented in ECSCW 2018 in London, UK.

We have surely seen a myriad of studies of work-life balance in the aftermath of the pandemic. But did you know that CSCW researchers had studied this topic for many years prior to the pandemic? This paper by Luigina Ciolfi and Eleanor Lockley is an excellent example. It shows how knowledge workers use practices of “sculpting boundaries” as planned or improvised acts of dealing with the boundaries between work and private life. As examples of this sculpting activities, the authors demonstrate how the people they studied used to set, dissolve or blur the boundaries: “We argue that blurring (softening or hardening) a boundary is different from dissolving one as a blurred boundary acts as a filter, for example in those situations in which a task or a practice can affect both work and non work.” This paper was published in the ECSCW journal track, and the journal version can be downloaded from the journal of CSCW.

Not to forget: You can download all the papers in our ECSCW gems series for free. Head to our own EUSSET digital library!