Half a Century of Work–Nonwork Interface Research: A Review and Taxonomy of Terminologies

The extensive interest in the work‐nonwork interface over the years has allowed scholars from multiple disciplines to contribute to this literature and to shed light on how professional and personal lives are related. In this paper, we have identified 48 terminologies that describe the interface or relationship between work and non‐work, and have organized them into mature, intermediate, and immature categories according to their stage of development and theoretical grounding. We also provide a taxonomy that places work‐nonwork interface terminologies into a matrix of six cells based on two dimensions: (1) type of nonwork being narrow or broad; and (2) nature of the mutual impact of work and nonwork domains on one another, characterizing the impact as negative, positive, or balanced. The type of nonwork dimension was informed by Frone's (2003) classification of employees’ lives into multiple subdomains; the mutual impact dimension was informed by frameworks that organized the literature in part by negative, positive, and balanced work‐nonwork interface constructs (e.g., Allen, 2012; Greenhaus & Allen, 2011). Theoretical contributions of the proposed taxonomy are discussed along with suggestions on important avenues for future research

A Song for My Supper: More Tales of the Field

This essay tries to be true to a podium talk I presented at a conference in March, 2008. But, of necessity, certain consolidation liberties are taken. Beginning with a brief and broad treatment of ethnography as a paired written representation of and lengthy personal experience in a particular social world, I move to consider why the former, the text, has been so infrequently examined in lieu of the latter, the so-called method. I then move to ethnographic texts themselves and look at what I take to be some broad changes the seem apparent — particularly within the organizational ethnography domain — over the past 20 or so years. Alongside these changes comes the emergence of several distinct genres treated only lightly (or not at all) in Tales of the Field. I end by considering what seems to have stayed the course in ethnography and why