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

This study investigates how education professionals balance their private and professional lives when using social technologies. Based on boundary theory and interviews with 57 education professionals, we identify which tactics they use to separate or integrate their private and professional life. We identified twice as many segmentation tactics compared to integration tactics and found that the education professionals struggled most with finding segmentation tactics that work. We argue that this is because social technologies are designed to support integration and therefore teachers using these technologies must work harder to separate their private and professional roles. There is a need to further investigate how boundary theory can be used, and segmentation tactics understood, when the object of study is social technology, which is specifically built to integrate time and professional and private spaces. For practice, there is a need to better support teachers in their use of social technologies.


INTRODUCTION
With the creeping advance of social technologies into every part of our lives, the possibility to almost seamlessly connect our working life with our private life is endless.To find a balance between work and home is something that many of us is looking for but find increasingly difficult to achieve.As working life and private life are no longer separated by distance and space, there is a need for other types of border strategies or boundary work tactics (Kreiner et al., 2009), to help maintain and find a practical balance between work and home.The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic reinforced this development and the blurring of private and work lives when many were forced to work from home, to limit the effects of the pandemic.The pandemic has, in this way, radically disrupted the manners in which we work (Hodder, 2020) and one group affected was education professionals, who found themselves in a digitally blurred state between home and work, in which private homes suddenly became the working place and the screen was the arena where they met with learners and colleagues.They were thus faced with an increasing number of challenges around boundary work.
One way to understand the impact of digitalisation on education professionals' (i.e., teachers in schools and lecturers in universities) work life and working environment is the ability to balance work requirements as part of the whole life puzzle, with the boundary between working life and private life as a central issue.Digitalisation of different educational settings can have positive effects, and support and facilitate connections between education professionals and learners, as well as facilitate dialogue among a group of colleagues.In this way, relationships can be extended and improved.On the other hand, the digitalisation of schools and universities, together with a more frequent use of social technologies, may become intrusive into the private lives of education professionals (as well as for learners and caregivers, for that matter), leading to stress and exhaustion (van Zoonen et al., 2016).In this research, social technologies are defined as technology or media with social purposes (Skaržauskienė et al., 2013).
Using social technologies is challenging for education professionals, when having to decide 'whether to engage with these tools and, if so, on what basis-as an individual (personally), or as a teacher (professionally)' (Fox & Bird, 2017, p.647).This blurring of the private and professional lives can cause conflicts at work (van Zoonen et al., 2016); for instance, when someone demonstrates their political view on Facebook, or when a colleague posts pictures of leisure activities on Instagram when they should be working.Additionally, the wide range of social technologies constantly compete for attention, making it hard to switch off, thus creating the risk of feeling disconnected from work (Cecchinato & Cox, 2020) and causing feelings of stress as well.
We see this balancing between work life and private life as a type of boundary work.Boundary work is a 'purposeful individual and collective effort to influence the social, symbolic, material, and temporal boundaries, demarcations and distinctions affecting groups, occupations and organisations' (Langley et al., 2019, p. 708).In our case, questions arise regarding which times education professionals are available online and how they feel about seeing their learners' home environment or showcasing their own homes.This balancing act is particularly difficult for education professionals because they are 'in society's spotlight in terms of examples of inappropriate use of social media but also under peer pressure to connect' (Fox & Bird, 2017, p. 647).This blurring of private and professional lives has been accentuated during the past year's pandemic-related move to distance teaching, further reinforcing the need to define the home/work boundaries.
The aim of this study is therefore to analyse education professionals' boundary work and, in particular, the tactics they use for balancing private and professional lives when using social technologies.To this end, we adopted boundary theory (Ashforth et al., 2000), which is concerned with how we can understand the management of boundaries between the private sphere and working life.
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows.The next section introduces boundary theory and discusses related research on it in relation to social technologies in the workplace in general, and schools and universities in particular.A summary of literature most relevant for our study ends this section.Section 3 presents the contextual setting and our research method.The fourth section presents our results.The two final sections comprise a discussion of the research findings, implications for practice and research, and avenues for future research.

BOUNDARY THEORY
Boundary theory is a body of work used for understanding boundary work, with a particular focus on how individuals move between, and manage work and nonwork roles and identities (Ashforth et al., 2000;Rothbard et al., 2005).The focus is on micro-transitions between work and home as a 'boundary-crossing activity' (Ashforth et al., 2000, p. 472).Previous research on transitions between work and home has mainly been concerned with nondigital transitions and border-crossing activities (Ashforth et al., 2000;Rothbard et al., 2005).Boundary theory has also been used in research on the management of professional and personal identities in relation to online social networks (Ollier-Malaterre et al., 2013).Their research illustrates how memberships in online social networks create different strategies for boundary management.Studies have shown that some people prefer a clear separation between work and home while others allow for greater integration (Ashforth et al., 2000).These boundary management strategies can be described in terms of integration or segmentation of professional and personal identities and roles (Rothbard et al., 2005).Integration refers to an overlap between work and home (including time, artefacts, and activities), while segmentation refers to the separation between work and home.Large differences between work and home identities and roles can be described as segmentation, whereas more minor differences can be viewed as integration (Ashforth et al., 2000).Strong integration or segmentation seldom occurs; thus, the individual boundary management strategy is better described as a continuum of integration-segmentation (Rothbard et al., 2005).More explicitly, boundary theory 'explores individuals' role transitions between the different roles they occupy and maintains that individuals erect mental fences around their work and life domains as a way of ordering these environments and their roles within them' (Ashforth et al., 2000;Ollier-Malaterre et al., 2013).

Boundary work tactics and social technologies
Writing as early as 1977, Aldrich and Herker (1977) acknowledged the role of technology for boundary spanning, stating that 'organisations with a mediating technology link clients or customers with each other ' (p. 222).Whereas Aldrich and Herker used examples of mediating technology in banks and post offices, the idea of technology in our context-as a mediating technology in schools and universities-is not far from seeing learners as the 'clients' of the school and university organisation.Townsend and Batchelor (2005) researched how technology has facilitated work-life balance in two small businesses.One company had a policy banning the use of mobile phones at work 'for health and safety reasons' while it was suspected that it came down to productivity issues.The other company had embraced the use of mobile phones and found that 'the convergence of the employee's work and nonwork life was an issue to grapple with' (p.265).Dén-Nagy (2014) reviewed literature on the effect of mobile phone use on work-life balance and specifically looked into technologies' impact on boundary management in terms of segmentation and integration.Dén-Nagy (2014), however, found it difficult to reach a clear conclusion mainly because the researched empirical studies came with many flaws-for example, not clarifying the supposed relationship between technology and society, technological determinism and sampling strategies.It was however concluded that technologies can both facilitate and hinder work-life boundaries.Cavazotte et al. (2014) researched the experiences of law firm employees in Brazil in relation to their company sponsored mobile use.Whereas not directly engaging with boundary theory, their findings include aspects of work-life balance.Whereas the employees reported appreciation of increased accessibility, accuracy, and speed in exchanges, they also worried about work being performed in unconventional times and not at the workplace.They also feared increased control and surveillance from superiors and reported on 'spousal resentment and new kinds of family conflicts' (p.85) mainly due the intrusion of privacy.Most research on boundary management has however focused on offline settings or technologies in general (and not social technologies), with notable exceptions such as Siegert and Löwstedt (2019), who showed that social technologies pose new challenges in new ways-such as increasing visibility and reducing individual privacy.Another focus has been on how social media sites are used to extend workplace relationships across personal and professional boundaries when employees use multiple profiles for the same social media (Archer-Brown et al., 2018).Others have researched the negative consequences of work-related use of social technologies and concluded that existing policies are not sufficient to counteract the negative consequences, for example, work/ life conflict and ultimately exhaustion (van Zoonen et al., 2016).Peluchette et al. (2013) discussed the lack of boundaries between a person's different roles as relative, friend, employee and so forth, which may present a dilemma for Facebook users, and discussed the option of totally avoiding the use of social technologies in the workplace/in the professional role.
Other researchers, such as Kreps (2010), have explained social media as revealing notions of 'the Self' and suggested the use of dedicated professional social media sites (e.g., not FB or Instagram) as a way of separating private life from working life.Skeels and Grudin (2009) described how tensions arose from the use of social technologies that spanned outside the organisational sphere to include other social groups than that of the organisation.Frampton and Child (2013) researched how professionals respond to coworker Facebook friend requests and showed that request responses depended on organisational privacy rules, the employees' current Facebook privacy management practices and coworker communication satisfaction.Many researchers (e.g., Frampton & Child, 2013;Karl & Peluchette, 2011;Vitak et al., 2012) have pointed to dilemmas with workplace relationships on social media where one party exerts authority over another-for instance, in a teacher-student relationship or a relation between a coworker and a manger.Peluchette et al. (2013) researched how employees responded to Facebook requests from a superior and found that 'if an employee does not like or respect his/ her boss, he/she would be more likely to react negatively to such a request.Also, situational factors, such as the nature of the organisation or company culture, could play a role in whether the employee perceives the request in a positive or negative way' (Peluchette et al., 2013, p. 293).Kreiner et al. (2009) explained how individuals make use of a variety of 'boundary work tactics' to balance their private and professional lives.Based on a qualitative study of the experiences of work-home balance of Episcopal clergy, they discovered that individuals use four types of boundary work tactics as tools to solve work-home problems and challenges (Kreiner et al., 2009).These are temporal, physical, behavioural and communicative.Temporal tactics refers to the control of work time, such as blocking off work time on the calendar, to plan work time and find time for respite (Kreiner et al., 2009).For example, they suggested that a temporal boundary work tactic can be to block off family time and a communicative boundary tactic can be to make expectations explicit for work-related communications outside of work-two tactics that can 'be useful in preventing work invasion into the home domain' (Park et al., 2011, p. 464).Physical tactics, on the other hand, involve the physical boundaries of boundary work.Kreiner et al. (2009) meant that physical boundaries can be manipulated through adapting physical boundaries, manipulating physical space, and through managing physical artefacts.Behavioural tactics are similar to different types of social practices used to solve home-work conflicts (Kreiner et al., 2009).These behavioural tactics include using other people as 'border-keepers' supporting the individual's boundary work, as well as using technology for keeping the balance needed, which of course can include separating home and work more clearly, as well as supporting the desired integration (Kreiner et al., 2009).Another type of behavioural tactics suggested by Kreiner et al. (2009) is invoking triage, which, at a time of emergency or crisis, stresses the ability to quickly decide what to prioritise and act based on that decision.Kreiner et al. (2009) stressed that an individual constantly adapts which aspects of work and home they integrate or separate.Allowing differential permeability means that an individual's enactment of a border is situational and that 'Any given border can be treated in different ways by different people' (Kreiner et al., 2009, p. 718).Segmentation and integration undergo constant negotiation and re-negotiation, and that individuals are, as put forward by Kreiner et al. (2009) '… not only capable of, but prefer, a mixture of both' (p.719).Communicative tactics refers, in Kreiner et al. (2009) work, to setting expectations and confronting violators.In the case of the Episcopal clergy, it could involve a priest letting his parishioners know in advance that Thursdays are sacred time when they are absolutely not to contact him.
Regarding education professionals' use of social technologies related to border work, we did not find many examples.One exception is the study by Thunman andPersson (2017, 2018), who used focus group interviews with Swedish secondary school teachers, and researched teachers' experiences of ethical dilemmas on Facebook.They found that, 'by having contact with pupils in a virtual social arena originally intended for private use, teachers' use of social media brings to fore and intensifies deep-rooted ethical questions about what the teacher role is and should be' (Thunman & Persson, 2018, p. 175).Another example is found in the work by Carpenter et al. (2019) who analysed, using data mining and inferential statistics, K-12 US teachers' profiles and tweets on Twitter.They showed that that the accounts generally maintained a professional focus and disclosed limited personal information (Carpenter et al., 2019).

METHODS
This study is designed as an interpretative case study (Walsham, 1995) with an empirical base of interviews and surveys at four compulsory schools, three universities, and one upper secondary school.Since we were interested in how teachers manage the boundaries between | 5 1468005x, 0, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ntwe.12301 by Statens Beredning, Wiley Online Library on [23/06/2024].See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions)on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License their professional and private lives, we used boundary theory (Ashforth et al., 2000;Rothbard et al., 2005) for the analysis.Interestingly enough, this research coincided with the pandemic of 2020-2021, which in many ways changed how education professionals and learners (i.e., students at universities as well as pupils in compulsory education) communicate, and affected the types of tools they use for communication, as well as how these tools are used.Our result is thus also a reflection of this encompassing pandemic-infused technological transformation.

Contextual setting
The Swedish compulsory schools and upper secondary schools are funded through the redistribution of municipal taxes to local schools, whereas the universities are funded through government taxes.The Swedish school system allows for private and public schools, but the schools and universities participating in this study are public.The four participating compulsory schools are located in two larger cities in Sweden and belong to rather small, affluent municipalities.The upper secondary school is located in the capital city and enrolls pupils from several different municipalities in that city.The universities are situated in two larger cities in the country.There were no policies in place in any of the schools or universities on how to-or how not to-engage with social technologies.In the upper secondary school, there was however a clearly stated culture that you should not use any other channels for communication than those provided by the school and the vice chancellor was reported to keep on reminding the teachers to not work after school hours.In the compulsory schools and universities, teachers seemed to be very much left up to their own devices with many teachers reporting that they are totally free to do as they see fit in their use of social technologies.One exception could, however, be seen in one of the three universities under study.This is a very well-reputed university and here our two informants stated that the university more or less required every teacher and researcher to use Twitter on a regular basis.

Data collection
As this research took place during the pandemic of 2020-2021, we had a hard time getting hold of education professionals to interview, as most teachers in Sweden were struggling with transforming all their education to distance mode.This made the sample of education professionals based on convenience, with contacts providing access.In 2020, we conducted interviews with 14 university teachers at three universities in Sweden.Later during 2021, we found an upper secondary school where almost all school teachers were willing to be interviewed, resulting in another 11 stories.A limitation in relation to the data collection and sample is that the experiences of school and university teachers will be different based on time spent with their learners.University teachers spend less time with students (e.g., as they are also doing research) than school teachers that have teaching as a full-time job.On the other hand, when it comes to using social technologies for collegial discussions and professional development the situation is more similar.
The questions during the interviews and in the survey were based on boundary theory (Ashforth et al., 2000;Rothbard et al., 2005) with a focus on how social technologies are used by education professionals.We asked questions related to which digital tools they use in their educational role with a particular focus on social technologies in relation to how they separate their private and professional use (e.g., via different accounts or different media).We intended to also investigate whether the mobility of the devices used made a difference in the education professionals' boundary work, but as it turned out all our informants used all devices-laptops, mobile phones and tablets-in the same way when moving them between their home and work.What constitutes 'social technologies' is not easy to define, especially after the pandemic.Very early during the interviews, we found that teachers had different opinions about which technologies should be counted as 'social'-some thought that only 'classic' social technologies, such as Facebook and Instagram, should be labelled under the umbrella term social technologies, whereas others considered Zoom and even e-mail as a social technology.We decided to let the education professionals themselves decide what they felt constituted a social technology.This left our analysis with a broad span of technologies ranging from different video-conferencing tools, such as Zoom and Teams, to social media apps such as Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram.
We asked why and where they use social technologies, as well as how often they use them, together with questions about potential changed technological use due to the pandemic.Our last area of enquiry concerned the management of social technologies, such as the nonexistence/existence of policies, guidelines or norms in the workplace and how they should use social technologies as professionals (see the interview guide in Appendix A).The interviews were conducted via Zoom and lasted about 40-45 min.The interviews were recorded and later transcribed by the first author.
We complemented the interviews with a survey, and in 2021 we used our contacts to send out a survey to four compulsory schools in Sweden.Twenty-seven school teachers took the time to answer our questions in the online survey.It was created using the online tool Survey & Report.The survey was based on the questions in the interview guide and contained only openended questions, apart from those pertaining to demographics such as gender, age and municipality.All in all, our study is based on the experiences of 52 education professionals.A summary of the empirical material is found in Table 1.

Data analysis
The first author conducted and transcribed the interviews.During the interviews, notes were taken in combination with the recording.The complete empirical material consisting of  We needed, however, to adapt Kreiner et al.'s (2009) original boundary work tactics, to the innate character of social technologies, to make sense of our empirical material.Social technologies' main functionality is to communicate, and before you start using them you set up your profile, as well as decide who can follow you.The possibility to use communicative tactics is therefore embedded in social technologies and a natural part of each tactic.As a consequence, we re-framed communicative tactics (as in, e.g., setting rules for what you write) as part of behavioural tactics.For our study purposes, we also found a need to expand on physical tactics.Considering the focus on social technology, which does not have any physical boundaries, we also included digital boundaries, such as using background screens showing one's work environment while at home.
Based on Kreiner et al. (2009) and our empirical material, we identified three types of social technology tactics that teachers use in their boundary work.These are behavioural tactics, temporal tactics, and physical tactics.

Behavioural tactics when using social technologies
Behavioural tactics can involve other people, such as getting help from them, setting expectations or confronting those who violate boundaries through the use of rules or reprimands (Cecchinato & Cox, 2020;Kreiner et al., 2009).But also, in reference to social technologies, to set expectations by having separate accounts for your professional and private role.

Temporal tactics when using social technologies
Temporal tactics refer to ways of controlling time in relation to work and home, such as blocking off segments of time for work and nonwork.Another temporal tactic used for strengthening the boundary between work can also be to set restrictions on when certain apps or websites can be accessed, or by deciding to not check e-mails after certain hours.Those who had a stronger desire to integrate home and work used functionalities such as notifications with vibration or sounds to signal that something needed their attention, or to have e-mails pushed anytime.

Physical tactics when using social technologies
Physical tactics refer to adapting physical boundaries, such as creating a distance or closeness between home and work.Physical tactics used to separate home and work can include taking off a smartwatch as a symbol of disconnecting from work, leaving the laptop in the office or using different devices for private and work purposes.This creates a physical detachment where employees separate work and private life manually through creating distance between the device and themselves.

Behavioural tactics for integration
One behavioural integration tactic is to use the same account for different groups, for example, the education professionals use their personal/private account for interactions with family, friends, colleagues and learners to integrate their personal and professional lives.Contrary to what Archer-Brown et al. ( 2018), and Stutzman and Hartzog (2012) reported about the common 'practice of multiple profile management' in the use of social technologies, none of our interviewed education professionals used this practice.Many use the same account to increase the integration of their private and professional lives.They deliberately blur their roles in different groups to create a more informal relation: I think it is important to be available to the students if you have a teaching assignment.I think it is tragic when students put teachers on pedestals and do not dare to talk to teachers about things that have to do with teaching or things that they are only interested in.As a university teacher, I think it is our responsibility to try to inspire and then we must be available, and we must cultivate students' curiosityand this means to be open and accessible.For that reason, I also use my private account in the student Facebook forum to make myself more approachable and accessible by, for example, joking about things, joking about myself.I think that makes the students see me more as human […]  A common response was also that the education professionals, due to the pandemic, felt a need to show a more personal and private side of themselves, to compensate for the lack of more informal meetings they used to have with the students in person: I started a Facebook group due to the pandemic because we felt that the informal contact was suffering.It worked very well-we discussed course content but in a less formal way.And we also received some positive exclamations from the students: "Oh, how fun this is!" (University teacher nr. 5) As colleagues did not meet as often during the pandemic compared to before, a need to use social technologies to compensate for the lack of social interactions and 'humanness' occurred.Our respondents thus expressed a need to blur the boundary between formal and informal within the group of education professionals: We created this Messenger group that was semi-formal and we used it in a new way by we mixing the professional and the social.Because we needed thatwe needed to support each other in new ways.There could be a funny picture on a Friday evening, and everyone tagged along, even those who had not used social media before.(University teacher nr.12) Many of our respondents were seeking a way to use social technologies to, if not erase, but at least perforate the boundary between the private and the professional in the university as well as in the school setting.This is of course related to the pandemic and the lack of social contacts, and as social technologies support social connections, they were seen as a good complement to other digital technologies.

Temporal tactics for integration
The temporal tactic for integration that we identified is that the education professionals use social technologies, to facilitate a more flexible and quicker interaction with the learners: For the classes that I am coaching, I have a Facebook group for messages and questions.It is the quickest way to get reminders and changes to schedules out at any time of the day.I, on my part, collect and post small notifications, jokes, frightening examples, and news.These I use for introductions or examples, and grounds for discussions for different lectures.These are particularly useful in English for grammar-and fact practice and other parts that the pupils should pay attention to.(Compulsory school teacher nr.19) Education professionals described how the pandemic forced them to use social technologies to interact with pupils.This has made them more digitally accessible to the learners.I am more accessible nowadays, they contact me more frequently just because it is possible.(Upper secondary school teacher nr. 5) In summary, the increased presence on social technologies, has changed the learners as well as the education professionals' availability and expectations in terms of flexibility and fast interactions.We saw that this increased use of social technologies had an effect on the use of social technologies for a more flexible, time-efficient tool for communication.

Physical tactics for integration
Most of our interviewed education professionals mentioned how they have been forced to use new technologies to reach out to learners during the pandemic.Education professionals were teaching and had coffee breaks using, for example, Zoom or Teams and often increased their presence on other social media to lessen the distance to their learners and colleagues.Some described how the virtual room replaced/mirrored their offices when they worked from home during the pandemic.
With Zoom, I have an open-door policy to my students.I tell them straight up that I am here in my room and they can pop by anytime they want-this is what I am paid for.[…] They used to come into my office, knock on my door, when they had problems.Now Zoom is my office-I always have my personal Zoom-room open even when I'm doing other things.Just knock on my door.When Corona came, this became a problem.How can we maintain this short distance to me as lecturer and teacher?Well, I say that my door is still always open.Instead of a knock I see them in the (digital) waiting room and I let them in if I have time or I ask them to come back in an hour or so.Sometimes there is more than one student entering and we can all have a discussion.(University teacher nr.14) This illustrates a similar aspect of increased presence on social technologies where learners as well as education professionals were expected to change all physical meetings and lectures/ lessons to the digital world.

Behavioural tactics for segmentation
A common behavioural tactic for segmentation is to limit the audience by using different social technologies for different purposes.This was a particularly common practice at the university.Education professionals expressing not wanting to see what others, either students or colleagues, post was a reoccurring theme in our interviews (and even more so during the pandemic, according to our respondents).
It can be problematic ….Even if I saw something that I didn't like, I would try to avoid that in supervision and not take it as an attribute of that person.What can I say?Make sure it does not impact my supervision.At least that is something that I would do … […] You do not want to assess their progression due to what they post but you can see that they spend a lot of time on Facebook.(University teacher nr.13) Another common behavioural tactic that education professionals use to manage the boundary between their private and professional roles is to limit the audience of their postings.They do this by either declining friend requests or by using different channels for different audiences.
I used to add students to my social media accounts, but I don't anymore.Because when I did, I became very careful with what I posted-if I have students there I do not think I should write political stuff.I shouldn't write that I think a certain political party is awful because maybe some of my students like that party.If I get a friend request [from a student] today I just decline.(University teacher nr.4) When education professionals were asked why they find it important to separate students from friends and colleagues, their answers were very clear.Every education professional that we interviewed were aware of the authority their role as an education professional comes with, for example, 'I am in power position.I would not [reach out to them] I only respond if they ask'.(University teacher nr. 1) It is a bit difficult because I am their teacher-if I get a student on Facebook or Twitter or whatever it becomes … problematic.Because my relationship with them is via my professional role-I do not know them privately.(University teacher nr. 6) A common answer is that the education professionals wait until the learners have graduated, when they are no longer in 'a power position', before they add students to their social platforms.
You have to be careful with private information, you should keep a distance from the students.After they have graduated it is a totally different story, then I can add old pupils.(Compulsory school teacher nr.25) This behavioural tactic is, in most cases, reported to have come into play because something happened in the past when the education professionals found it problematic to have current learners on their social media.Many teachers recalled instances when blurring of the teacher-student roles had negative consequences.
I have thought about it a lot over the years.Do you remember when [name of teacher] tried to be funny with our IT-students and made jokes on Facebook and bantered students about Hackaton and so forth?It was not good for that Facebook group because it is semi-formal.One student was so upset that he left the group.(University teacher nr.12) Whereas most education professionals seemed very clear about their roles towards the learners, an interesting exception was seen among the university teachers where the role became less clear regarding the PhD students.In a way, the PhD students emerge as border spanners: I do have some PhD-students in my private space.I regard them more as colleagues and I would not mind adding my own PhD-students as friends.Sure, there is a power-relation there too, but I think it is different anyway.(University teacher nr.4) However, even though the university teachers assign the PhD students' roles as colleagues, some mentioned that it can sometimes be a problem to have them as friends in their social fora when they think their student/colleague should work more: It becomes a bit weird to have your PhD students there when they do not perform as they should and you can see that they are busy doing other things … should I like this post?I think she should be doing other things.In those situations, you end up between the private and the professional.(University teacher nr. 3) Another power relation that education professionals at the university found blurry was among colleagues when one is superior to the other via title or position.Some managers are careful about what they write and whether or not their colleagues have opinions about it: When [name of boss] was head of the unit, he posted a lot of political stuff and I thought he should restrict himself because he was our boss.I saw many problems with him posting like he did, and I told him, but he just said that he did not care.So, I find that very problematic.(University teacher nr.14) So far, we have identified and discussed both clear and unclear roles, such as education professional-learner and employer-employee, but at the university level we also found that university teachers created stronger boundaries and separated the audience based on titles, or whether the audience is national or international, among colleagues.Temporal tactics for segmentation A temporal tactic for segmentation that education professionals use is to limit the time when they use social technologies.They stated that they 'do not check e-mails or chats after 5:00 P.M. or during evenings' or how they are 'highly available from 8:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. on weekdays' (Upper secondary school teachers nr. 1 & 3).The school teachers described how learners contact them during evenings and weekends, but '… that it does not burden me because I do not check' (Upper secondary school teacher nr.2).
We also found that education professionals limit the number of channels as a way to save time and separate home time from worktime.This practice was more apparent among school teachers with younger learners-most likely because younger children use a larger variety of apps and other technologies.
Education professionals described how 'the pupils do not use the same social media as we adults.I do not want to manage several different fora' (Compulsory school teacher nr.19) and how they 'get stressed because my pupils are using so much media' (Upper secondary school teacher nr.2).Several education professionals referred to how much time it takes to check many different channels: 'I have to make sure not to have too many channels to check, I must have time to check the e-mail' (upper secondary school teacher nr. 1) or 'I only use Facebookone channel is enough or it will take too much time' (University teacher nr.5).

Physical tactics for segmentation
An effect of our study taking place during the pandemic is that we found no instances of a physical tactic, such as leaving the laptop or work phone in the office, simply because this was not an option for education professionals that were forced to work from home.A new physical intrusion reported by many was how they found this new way of seeing their learners in their homes to be too intimate and intrusive.Now with Covid we are using Teams and I see what they do in the kitchen, if it is messy and how they take care of their children.Shout at them.I really do not like that.And they can see the mess in my kitchen!(Upper secondary school teacher nr. 3) A segmentation tactic mentioned by the education professionals, used during the pandemic, is the need to protect their home environments from becoming a showcase by using background screens.
To sum up, it is clear from the narratives that social technologies challenge education professionals' attempts to separate different roles and audiences.We would argue that this is due to social technologies' boundary-spanning characteristics.It is also clear that boundary spanning has increased during the pandemic (in line with the increased use of social technologies), and that there is little, or no, guidance for teachers on how to navigate their different roles when using social technologies.Table 2 summarises the social technology tactics we identified.In the table, we can see that tactics related to segmentation, i.e. to separate the professional life from the private life is more common than tactics related to integration, that is, tactics used to blend private life with professional life.The behavioural tactics where education professionals make sure that the content posted in social technologies reach the intended audience are the most common.The tactics related to time has more to do with one's own work load and when to work, whereas the physical tactics concern the use of the room and what to show can be seen as important for not only keeping one's own privacy, but also not to intrude on others.
Whereas the tactics summarised in Table 2 were clearly described by the education professionals, it is important to point out that there are not always clear delineations between segmentation and integration.Boundary work is not static, but rather it should be seen as a continuum in which an individual can be on different ends (Nippert-Eng, 1996;Sayah, 2013).This is in line with Kossek and Lautsch (2012) who identified three different boundary management styles: integrators that blend work and private life; separators that clearly divide the work life from the private, and alternators that alternate between the two tactics.We found many to be in this third category.

Social technology tactics used by education professionals
Our analysis shows that education professionals use social technologies to integrate as well as segment their social, professional, and private worlds.We found that twice as many tactics were related to segmentation compared to tactics based on integration.This is not surprising given that social technologies are designed to integrate.However, new integration tactics emerged during the Covid pandemic when teachers saw a need to make up for the rules of social distancing.Education professionals specifically used four tactics: use the same account for different groups; create an informal relation with learners by showing a more personal and private side of themselves; use the timeless feature of social technologies to be accessible at any time of the day or by responding quicker, and keep the virtual room open in the same way as the office door when working from home.Whereas more recent research (e.g., Archer-Brown T A B L E 2 Social technology tactics used by education professionals.

Social technology tactics
Segmentation Integration

Behavioural
• Censor what to write.
• Using restrictions to manage who access certain parts of your profile.• Be careful who to 'add'.
• Limit the audience.
• Use different social technologies for different purposes.
• Creating an informal relation with learners by showing a more personal and private side of themselves.• Use the same account for different groups.
• Limit the number of different social technologies to use.
• Use the timeless feature of social technologies to be accessible at any time of the day or by responding quicker.

Physical
• Using office background screens from home.et al., 2018;Stutzman & Hartzog, 2012) has reported on integration tactics to extend workplace relationships across personal and professional boundaries when employees use multiple profiles and accounts, we found that some of our education professionals deliberately chose to not use different profiles, to be 'open' and be seen as more 'human'.The strategy to overcome spatial barriers using technologies is nothing new, with 'remote learning' having a history dating back over 100 years (if including radio).However, with the recent pandemic, this practice has been forced on most education professionals and learners and, whereas remote teaching has previously been conducted mainly in other spaces such as the office or a learning centre, now the space also more naturally includes the home environment-something that entails new boundary conflicts.
The eight tactics we identified among our education professionals for segmentation can also be seen in relation to the increased use of integration tactics that emerged as a response to the need for social distancing during the pandemic.These tactics relate to censoring what to write, the use of restrictions for who can access certain parts of their profile, being careful who to 'add', limiting the audience, the use of different social technologies for different purposes, controlling time, limiting the number of different social technologies, and using office background screens at home.The strategy to limit what one writes to manage the boundary between private and professional roles is new to us and we have not seen it in previous literature.The closest to this self-censorship that we can find is in how Peluchette et al. (2013) described how the lack of boundaries between a person's different roles as relative, friend, and employee can present such a dilemma for Facebook users that they consider the option of totally avoiding the use of social technologies in their professional role.The segmentation strategy to limit the audience of postings by either declining friend requests or by using different channels for different audiences is in line with the findings of Peluchette et al. (2013) who discussed how the lack of boundaries between a person's different roles as relative, friend, and employee is a dilemma for Facebook users.They can therefore avoid the use of social technologies in their professional role or 'might be reluctant to accept a friend request from a work colleague or a church friend' (Peluchette et al., 2013, p. 293).In our case, this was most apparent among the university teachers when one party was superior to the other, via title or position.Karl and Peluchette (2011) showed that employees responded to Facebook requests from superiors and found that the characteristics of the manager (e.g., gender, marital status, age), or the nature of the relationship that the employee had with his/her manager (e.g., respect, admiration), impacted the response to such requests.Similarly, we found that the university teachers excluded professors from informal groups and disliked how superiors shared their political views on social platforms.Many researchers (e.g., Frampton & Child, 2013;Karl & Peluchette, 2011;Vitak et al., 2012) have pointed to similar dilemmas when workplace relationships are made on social media and one party exerts authority over another.In our case, we found that education professionals are aware of their power position over the learners, referring to 'a power distance' and their 'professional ethics'.Just as Thunman andPersson (2017, 2018) described, the respondents in our study also experienced ethical dilemmas regarding what their role as education professionals should be.Another way to separate the professional from the private is to use different media for different purposes.This is in line with recommendations from Kreps (2010) who explained social media as revealing notions of 'the Self' and therefore more professional social media sites (e.g., not FB or Instagram) would be more appropriate for employees to use in their professional social media use.

Segmentation tactics in an integrating technology
For this study, building on education professionals' experiences of using social technologies, we needed to take into account the integrating characteristics of social technologies and redefine the integration and segmentation practices when the technology is intended for integration and boundary crossing (not all technologies are!).As was shown in the result section, teachers used twice as many tactics related to segmentation compared to integration-type tactics.They also struggled most with finding segmentation tactics that work, compared to tactics for integration.We argue that this is due to the inherent character of social technologies being integratingand also fuelled by the need of overcoming social distancing during the pandemic.Social technologies are built with the specific aim of integrating time, space, and different social worlds.When education professionals want to use different features of the technology for further integration, the technologies support these efforts.When teachers want to segregate further, they often need to take more drastic measures such as not using the medium at all or censoring what they write, as this is not as easily supported by social technologies.When discussing boundary work tactics in light of social technologies, we therefore need to take this into consideration.

Implications for research and practice relevant for future research
Whereas several researchers have lately acknowledged technology as an 'enabler', 'acilitator', 'mediator', or 'influencer' for boundary spanning (e.g., Cecchinato & Cox, A., 2020;Siegert & Löwstedt, 2019;Townsend & Batchelor, 2005;Yeow, 2014), we would further the discussion by pointing out that social technology has, by default, an unbounded nature, which is a prerequisite for integration and boundary spanning-particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic.Previous researchers that have pointed to the enabling characteristics of social technologies have not taken into account their de-facto inherent integrating feature of these technologies that cannot be overlooked if we are to understand boundary work practices when using social technologies.We need to accept the fact that social technologies are designed to support integration and that teachers using these technologies have to work harder to separate their private and professional roles.We also need to consider the ever-changing character of these technologies and we need to research how people create new coping strategies, new ways to manage borders to 'help with identifying not only present challenges but future developments' (Dén-Nagy, 2014, p. 207).
For research, there is therefore a need to further investigate how boundary theory can be used, and segmentation tactics understood, when the object of study is social technology with its de-facto inherently integrating character.Previous research using boundary theory for developing a better understanding of boundary work when using social media (e.g., Kreiner et al., 2009;Ollier-Malaterre et al., 2013) has not acknowledged technology as an important part of the complex socio-technical network where technology in use (here social technologies) influence as well as is being influenced by its surrounding context.A social technology such as social media by necessity influences how we address and analyse border work.The role of social technologies is to support and develop relations, which makes the border work when we want to keep work and home apart quite laborious.Also, social technologies can be viewed as a manifestation of what Bauman (2012)  with the ever-changing content of social technologies that can penetrate time and space deeply affects how border work is carried out.In a 'liquid modernity' with 'infinite and indefinite possibilities' (Bauman, 2012, p. 79), social technologies can be seen as the guardians and cocreators of a 'liquid modernity'.
There is a risk that by using boundary theory we view segmentation and integration as two opposites whereas we, based on our findings, can see that we rather should view segmentation and integration on a continuum -stipulated by the situation and the technology in use.By acknowledging this we also found a need to adapt the tactics suggested by Kreiner et al. (2009) to better reflect what is already inscribed in social technologies, but these adaptions need to be further tested and modified.
For practice, given that twice as many tactics were related to segmentation compared to tactics based on integration, teachers need more administrative and managerial support to balance work life and private life, as the technology itself does not support that.As the postpandemic era are influencing not only work in general, but teaching in particular, towards more hybrid structures, the educational institutions will need to be more prepared for a teaching profession characterised by constant border work.Teachers, and school leaders, will need to have constant discussions about their work environment and organisational culture supporting each other's border work.School leaders and teachers would also benefit from an agreement of what borders to set up in their institutions.
For future research, it would be interesting to revisit the respondents and investigate whether their experience from teaching today using social technologies differs from when we met them during the pandemic.

I
use LinkedIn and Facebook … I have no different accounts or lists, but I use different media for different purposes.I use LinkedIn quite often for academic purposes, but for private I usually use Facebook.I tend to use different platforms for different purposes.(University teacher nr. 1) One of the most common strategies that education professionals use to manage the boundary between their private and professional roles is to put censorship on themselves regarding what they write (if they post anything at all).I think about what I post on Facebook.Sometimes I remove posts after I have posted them.It is something of a burden, or it makes me feel uneasy, to have to think about it-should this person be in a restricted group or not?(University teacher nr.10) Education professionals also use different restrictions to control the content of social media.Initially in the beginning [of my teaching career] people used to tag me in pictures and sometimes these pictures were offensive or about bad things, so I started adding these restrictions [on who could access my pictures and tag me], but this was only in the beginning.I do think about what I post because now people pay attention to social media.I am careful.(University teacher nr.8) | 11 1468005x, 0, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ntwe.12301 by Statens Beredning, Wiley Online Library on [23/06/2024].See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions)on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ntwe.12301 by Statens Beredning, Wiley Online Library on [23/06/2024].See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions)on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License

I
created the messenger group for our colleagues as a response to covid […] I included everyone apart from the professors.I invited PhD students, but not the professors.I tried to be strict with only colleagues.(University teacher nr.8) I am thinking that I have many external people among my colleagues that I have become acquainted with via my research, so I think about what I look like from other universities' perspectives and especially if the audience is national or international.How does what I post affect the view of me? (University teacher nr. 6) | 13 1468005x, 0, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ntwe.12301 by Statens Beredning, Wiley Online Library on [23/06/2024].See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions)on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
Kreiner et al. (2009)://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ntwe.12301 by Statens Beredning, Wiley Online Library on [23/06/2024].See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions)onWileyOnlineLibraryforrules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons Licenseinterview transcripts, notes and survey responses were analysed using the framework of boundary work tactics suggested byKreiner et al. (2009).They found, basing their work on boundary theory, that people use different boundary work tactics 'in response to incongruence, boundary violations and conflict' (p.715).Building on their work, we found that we could better understand the role of social technology for teachers' boundary work.
so I use Facebook for that.And it works.It is a good channel because it is semi-informal.It is very clear what is what.It's about cultivating my identity in front of the students outside the teaching context.(University teacher nr.14) Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ntwe.12301 by Statens Beredning, Wiley Online Library on [23/06/2024].See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions)on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License calls 'liquid modernity', for example, a society characterised by fluidity, uncertainty and individuality.The lack of solid structure together | 17 1468005x, 0, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ntwe.12301 by Statens Beredning, Wiley Online Library on [23/06/2024].See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions)on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License How to cite this article: Andersson, A. & Hedström, K. (2024) How education professionals manage personal and professional boundaries when using social technologies.New Technology, Work and Employment, 1-20.https://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12301APPENDIX A: INTERVIEW GUIDE TEACHERS: THE USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA AND BOUNDARY WORK [English version] Background • How long have you worked as a teacher?• What are your main tasks?(teach, research, administration, management, other) Social Media • Do you use social media?Which?• Do you mainly use social media for private reasons or also in your job as a teacher/ researcher/other?If sowhich other reason/roles?And for what purpose?Do you mix private connections with student connections in your social media use?Do you mix colleagues/students? Voluntarily or as stipulated for some course etc? Has this changed since the Covid pandemic?• Where do you use social media in your professional role (at work/at home/in the store/ everywhere…)?Has this changed since the Covid pandemic?• When do you use social media in your professional role (during working hours/outside working hours?)How often do you use social media related to your job?Can you tell us how often or how much/little you use social media?(Try to estimate time consumption) Is it many times a day or a lot of time, occasionally or once a week?Less frequently?Could you describe how you use social media on a typical day?Does it look differently on evenings and weekends?How? Has this changed since the Covid pandemic?• How do you as a teacher/researcher differentiate between your private role and your professional role when using social media?Are you using the same or different accounts?Do you set boundaries in any way?For example, when you use different social media, who do you have as friends, what topics do you discuss, do you have different accounts for different purposes?Has this changed since the Covid pandemic?• Are there policies, instructions, guidelines on how to use social media at your work?If so, which ones?If so, who wrote these guidelines?If so, do you know how they are used?Do people abide?Is the use of social media discussed between colleagues?• Are there any advantages or disadvantages to using social media for work?Which?What consequences do you think the use of social media has on the work environment?Has this changed since the Covid pandemic?• Anything else I should have asked about?Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ntwe.12301 by Statens Beredning, Wiley Online Library on [23/06/2024].See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions)on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License