Personal boundaries

Contributors: Jerry Michalski, Jessica Margolin, Neil Goldberg, Mark Petrakis, Sam Perry, Eric Grant, Fred Turner, Jacob Doty, Kaliya Hamlin, Eileen Clegg

Summary:
Boundaries between work, social life and personal identity will increasingly blur and dissolve--and a multitude of institutional forms will emerge at that intersection.


Overview

New work practices: Time-shifting, tele-commuting, out-sourcing - all these phenomena and more change the nature of our social and work relationships, as well as the assumptions by which we carry out our day-to-day tasks. Employers seek to gain advantage brought on by these changes through the reduction of costs, workforce and benefits. Ultimately, those who live and work in these transitional spaces, or are adversely affected by such changes, will move to reclaim legitimacy for themselves.

Group discovery: Same-sex couples, foreign workers, the self-employed, the statistically poor, displaced auto-workers, victims of natural disaster - all these groups and more have great incentive to organize themselves alongside others who share their point of view. As the cost of on-line networking becomes affordable to even the more disenfranchised sectors of society, and as the bar of difficulty to finding and connecting with others is lowered, so might broadly supported social movements emerge to redress the grievances of such groups that feel they are not being heard - either socially or legally. (mp)


Thought Leaders

From the IFTF workshop Tuesday 28 March 2006, participants Christina Taylor and Michael Ward--

We considered the issue of the blurring of the boundaries between work, social life, and personal identity in terms of aspects of marketing focus and targeting, and of public policy issues. We think:

this blurring, reducing our life-focus dependence on workplace structures and substituting for it a focus on personal interests and a greater emphasis on interactions with others sharing those interests, will both broaden and narrow the way in marketing can/will target the individual--

* broaden, in the sense that marketing aimed at people defined by workplace structures (and implicitly by class, financial grouping, race and gender boundaries) will become more diffuse as it becomes more difficult to appeal to people no longer self-defining by those boundaries;

* narrow, as people create their own lives, and in the rich exposition of their identities provide very specific, targetable marketing hooks.

Various people will approach this blurring in variously different ways, some using self-definition to establish rigid boundaries and some to establish very fluid boundaries.

*** This is an opportunity to market Self-Exploration tools. Examples: the MySpace model; role-playing in all its forms

For some individuals there will be a fear of being lost, with the loss of externally defined identities.

*** This is an opportunity to market Security tools. Another way to look at it: buy these brands and you will become Safe. Thus the Brand becomes the Church.

>>>>>

In the short time we had we could only just begin to discuss the public policy aspects, and first we had to consider what public policy as a term might mean, in a discussion about blurred boundaries.

To the extent that the change is a personal choice, this choice is aided or limited by any external policy, whether governmental (read public), cultural, financial, etc. We tried to generalize by saying that this becomes, in the abstract, the relationship of the Group to the Individual.

As for specifics, we saw that individuals will be more likely to break commercial and business laws (both national and international) as personal and work (i.e. business) lives merge. Our news media are already full of the legal battles that result from this change.

>>>>>

Time was up! This is what we were able to do.


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