Women, smartphones and the workplace: pragmatic realities and performative identities

This paper explores the ways that a sample of professional women use smartphones to manage their personal activities and work responsibilities. It reveals a number of specific, mindful practices used to convey and enable accessibility, professionalism and responsiveness to colleagues and clients, showing how smartphones are used to shape and maintain professional identities. At the same time, women also choose to set boundaries to ensure that the immediacy enabled by their smartphones does not encroach upon their personal relationships in undesirable or unpredictable ways, and to allow them to choose when to engage with work while outside the office. The paper reveals the nuances of smartphone use in this group of women, demonstrating various approaches to managing a potentially disruptive communications device to professional and personal advantage