Working Paper No 157

Ring, ring…why don’t you leave me alone?: The impact of the work mobile phone on the work-life balance

Diannah Lowry, Megan Moskos

The role of technology and flexibility in work and employment has sparked much debate, with optimistic accounts on the one hand and with more negative views on the other. Technology however is not homogenous in its uses or in its impacts. While work technologies such as the internet and email have been critically studied, the way(s) in which the mobile phone may shape work and workers’ experiences has largely avoided scholarly attention. This paper is the result of a wider study and builds on a previous paper which explored a broad range of issues associated with the use of the mobile phone for work purposes. The key focus of this current paper is on how the mobile phone may shape the boundaries between the public (work) and private (home) domains, and on how these boundaries are negotiated or navigated. This study involved in depth interviews with 20 workers from different occupational and organisational settings. Participants’ narratives suggested both positive and negative impacts of the mobile phone on the work-life balance, seeing the work mobile phone as a ‘double-edged’ sword (Lowry and Moskos, 2005). Positive and negative impacts of the mobile phone were dependant on occupation, economic and market forces, contextual factors associated with bureaucratic structures, and the reported degree of instrumental agency in mobile phone usage.

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