How education professionals manage personal and professional boundaries when using social technologies

This study investigates how education professionalsbalance their private and professional lives when usingsocial technologies. Based on boundary theory andinterviews with 57 education professionals, we identifywhich tactics they use to separate or integrate theirprivate and professional life. We identified twice asmany segmentation tactics compared to integrationtactics and found that the education professionalsstruggled most with finding segmentation tactics thatwork. We argue that this is because social technologiesare designed to support integration and thereforeteachers using these technologies must work harderto separate their private and professional roles. There isa need to further investigate how boundary theory canbe used, and segmentation tactics understood, whenthe object of study is social technology, which isspecifically built to integrate time and professional andprivate spaces. For practice, there is a need to bettersupport teachers in their use of social technologie
Ledarskap för ett hållbart digitalt arbetsliv: teknikstrategier och arbetslivets gränser