The end of boundaries: Technovation, technostress, and the rise of the neo work-life domain.

Abstract

Do digital boundaries still exist, or have mobile devices permanently collapsed the threshold between office and home? In this era of pervasive technovation, the traditional separation between professional and personal lives is undergoing a qualitative ontological collapse. Moving beyond the ‘boundary-blurring’ narrative, we theorise the generative mechanism behind this collapse: the sociomaterial entanglement of technological affordances, neoliberal organisational norms, and worker habitus. Drawing on a qualitative study of 42 UK professionals that uses the Gioia methodology, we analyse how hyperconnectivity reconfigures the work-life interface into a state of indistinction. Our findings reveal that employees adopt deliberate integration not as a preference but as a structural survival strategy within a high-responsiveness culture, facilitating the neo work-life domain. We conceptualise this neo work-life domain as a unitary, nomadic space where roles are perpetually concurrent and structured by an internalised professional habitus. Living within this neo work-life domain produces deeply paradoxical outcomes: While providing vital ICT resources, it generates compounded technostress, an environment where simultaneous stressors overwhelm cognitive recovery. Because compounded technostress triggers acute psychological risks, our primary theoretical contribution proposes that contemporary labour has fundamentally shifted from boundary management to attention management. We define ‘attention management’ as the cognitive filtering of role simultaneity and argue that it represents the final contested terrain of modern work. We conclude by highlighting the UK’s institutional ‘void’ and underscoring the urgent need for structural interventions, such as a statutory ‘right to disconnect’, to protect cognitive autonomy in a borderless neo work-life domain.