New mobile information and communication technologies are of special interest to researchers seeking to understand the problematic of boundaries between work and personal-life. This study examines how workers used and interpreted the personal digital assistant (PDA) as a boundary management resource. Using a protocol that combined structured, closed-ended questions with open-ended questions, 42 users were interviewed. The data were analyzed to examine individuals' practices in using this technology, the interpretive resources they drew upon, and the ways in which the spirit of the device's design intersected with their practices and interpretations. Results suggest that the spirit of the device is control, and that users interpreted their technological practices as expressions of personal agency, using the PDA to control the work—life boundary through both integration and segmentation of work and personal-life.

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This study explores the relations among interpersonal communication, self-identity, and conditions of modernity in the context of work and parenting. The conceptualization of role construction as communicative process is an extension of the idea that social reality, which includes social and personal identity, is created through human interaction. Conditions of modernity intensify individuals' experience of self-identity as constructed rather than given, and heighten the constitutive function of interpersonal communication with respect to the definition and maintenance of role-identities. The data for this study were obtained through in-depth interviews with 8 dual earner couples in the early stages of their first-time transition to parenthood. Interview transcripts were analyzed using Strauss and Corbin's grounded theory approach. Three primary elements of role construction emerged from the respondents' accounts. Three features of modernity that have special relevance to this process are delineated. Evidence from the accounts of the functioning of elements of role construction under conditions associated with modernity is presented.

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Work-life research tends to privilege the organization-employee relationship, with the family's role largely relegated to providing emotional and material support to the employee and adapting to organizational requirements. Systems oriented research, however, points toward a larger role for the family, including mediating the employee's relationship with the organization as well as direct organizational interactions. This study uses Weick's model of organizational sensemaking to examine, through the analysis of employee and family interview accounts, how a global high-tech organization and its employees' families enact one another as environments. Three dynamics of mutual enactmentstwo cooperative and one competitive-were identified, along with implications for work-life integration research and practice, for more traditionally programmatic work-life accommodations, and for families' management of their relationships to employing organizations.

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