This study offers a new perspective anchored in boundary theory on individuals’ life-puzzle (LP), especially the ones of women entrepreneurs in Sweden. This chapter is based on qualitative research. This chapter argues for a deeper understanding of work/non-work preferences for each boundary between life domains in order to comprehend the complexity of an individual’s life-puzzle as a combination of integration and segmentation at the service of their wellbeing. Findings show that women entrepreneurs in Sweden mostly develop blended LP composed of three domains: entrepreneurial work (EW), social, and family. EW combines the work and private domains as entrepreneurship is a way to align work activities with personal values and personal interest to stimulate higher needs in terms of sustainable society. The entrepreneurs’ LP is a result of integration and segmentation that complement each other. However, the range of blending/overlapping is greatly variated between individuals so that a zone of work-life reconciliation (ZWLR) is emerging. This chapter concludes that there is a zone of work-life reconciliation for entrepreneurs but that its size/shape/scope is contingent on the level of support for (women) entrepreneurship offered and perceived in time and place.

Despite an apparent expansive inclusivity of the aims of work–life programmes, there remains a fairly narrowly defined heteronormative view of the family. Alternative and non-normative perspectives of family life, and especially those pertaining to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transsexual (LGBT) identities, remain relatively occluded and under-researched. The aim of this paper is to question the presence and relevance of LGBT voices and perspectives in work–life research as they seem neither visible nor on the frontline of work–life research despite their increasingly legitimate presence in organisational and societal discourses.

Attaining work‐life balance is one of most important needs for the 21st century global population. Traditionally, the work‐life issues have been mostly treated from a sociologic perspective and from a business/HR perspective, work‐life issues also belong to "urban studies". Indeed, from a work‐life perspective, urbanisation indicates that cities represent one context in which individuals may fulfil their "needs" or "wants" to meaningfully develop and management life domains. In line with the person‐fit model, , the city and its urban physical milieu play a role in individuals` work/non‐work boundary making process. This paper is anchored in boundary management undelying that individuals create and manage different boundaries to reach their preference for segmentation or integration. Based on visual data this research presents physical urban elements affecting boundary making. In connecting visual data with comments, this paper explains how these elements affect affecting boundary making.

Attaining work-life balance is one of most important needs expressed by the 21st century global population in the western world. Such balance relies on boundary work and boundary management processes that when combine lead to individuals' work/non-work experiences. As experiences, this paper aims underlining and understanding how narratives participate to the work/non-work experiences. This paper reveals that six narratives are in fact present in individual's work/non-work experiences. It reveals that each of them is purposive. Together, narrative participate to diverse elements of the work/non-work experiences especially to boundary work, boundary management but also to the development of work/non-work self-identity or even to the development of the actual organisational formal and informal context. This paper thus suggests that further and deeper adopting a narrative perspective is needed to understand work/non-work experiences especially when combined with a "narrative approach" to access work/non-work experiences.

Previous research (Bjuggren & Duggal, 2012) shows that more than half of all family businesses in Sweden are located in rural areas. This fact has, however, not been much noticed in research so far. Unique for rural entrepreneurship is that the business and the family home often are located at the same physical place; sometimes it is literally the same place. In that regards, boundaries between work and non-work are blurred. Rural entrepreneurship may be comparable to the "pre-industrial" society where integration was seen as a norm, but the development of our society lead to value separation between work and non-work, today it is a cultural norm to separate between the two. In rural context, separation of work place and home place is indeed observable. Today, however, new entrepreneurship is developed, like "bed and breakfast", like "experience one week-end at the farm", like "riding school" and so forth. What we observe is thus a panel of ways to which boundaries between work and non-work are defined by rural entrepreneurs. We use theories from the field of work non-work boundary theory and management (integration, segmentation, permeability of boundaries, flexibility of boundaries) to frame this phenomenon. So far, this theoretical framework has been scarcely applied on the field of family businesses and only recently used in rural entrepreneurship (see for example Andersson-Cederholm and Hultman, 2010) especially with consequences on individual's well-being. Considering that rural entrepreneurship is central to of the rural economic development, it becomes central to further understand rural entrepreneurial family businesses and how the family and the business construct boundaries between work and non-work activities. This is the aim of this paper.

The relations between work and personal life have long been on the public, business, and research agenda (see Hall & Richter, 1988; Kossek, et al., 2005). Such relations have been conceptualised in different ways going from “work-family relations (see Friedman & Greenhaus, 2000) to “work/non-work relations” (Languilaire, 2009) passing by “work-personal life relations”. In this paper, we refer to “work/non-work relations” where non-work is defined as there major life domains namely: the family, the social and the private (Languilaire, 2009). The accumulation of knowledge in the work/non-work relation is not to be undermined so that the work-life field has reached considerable development in understanding work/non-work challenges. Additionally, research on work/non-work relations points out that developing work/non-work strategies is essential to individual’s well-being (see Frone, Yardley, & Markel, 1997; Geurts & Demerouti, 2003; Poelmans, O'Driscoll, & Beham, 2005). As matter of fact, Kossek et al. (2005, p. 351) in the context of work and family relation, touched upon in 2005 upon what could be seen as individual strategies indicating that ”everyone has a preferred, even if implicit, approach for meshing work and family roles that reflects his or her values and the realities of his or her lives for organising and separating role demands and expectations in the realms of home and work”. (Kossek, et al., 2005, p. 351). Based on social cognitive theory and especially on Zerubavel's social mindscapes (see Zerubavel, 1991; Zerubavel, 1997), Nippert-Eng (1996) popularised in 1996 two major strategies to combine life domains, namely integration and segmentation. One the one hand, people wishing segmentation define strict lines because they do not accept a mixture betwen their life domains and want to avoid such mixtrure. On the other hand, people wishing integration define no lines and do not distinguish any life domains. Whereas several pieces of research have measured the degree of integration and segmentation (see Bulger, et al., 2007), what is actually done by individuals while segmenting and integrating is under-researched. Additionally, whereas most research focus on ”employees”, less empirical research is based in ”self-employed/entrepreneurs”. This research focuses on these two research gaps. To address these gaps, this research has its origins in the boundary perspective that “address the construction of work-family boundaries as a complex interplay between employees' strategies and preferences, the social contexts in which they are embedded, and both the idiosyncratic and cultural meanings attached to work and family” (Desrochers & Sargent, 2003, p. 5). Within the boundary perspective, individuals develop diverse types of boundaries enabling them to organise their life domains (work, family, social and private) so that they can enact their strategies for integration or segmentation. Several boundary types have been discussed in research among those the spatial, temporal and psychological boundaries (see Clark, 2000; Ahrenten, 1990). In an in-depth narrative analysis of individual’s work/non-work experiences, Languilaire (2009) indicates that seven boundaries are developped and managed by individuals. Each boundary is concerned with one specific aspect of one’s life namely: time, space, behaviours, people, thoughts, emotions and psychosomatic elements such as stress or energy. For each type of boundaries, individuals develop tactics enabling them as a whole to reach their ”wished” strategy towards segmention or integration. In line with Kossek, Noe, and DeMarr (1999) work/non-work tactics can be understood as the visible and practical activities enabling an individual to concretely place and transcend (i.e. cross) boundaries or, in turn, to render boundaries more or less permeable and/or flexible. For example, an integrator may develop tactics to segment time. One of theses tactics could be “by pre-deciding of time slots in his/her agenda” so that he/she ”reserves time” for each domain with no possible overlap. Based on empirical data, Languilaire (2009) develop an extensive (not exhaustive) list of tactics used by employed middle-managers. This list will be the base for the analysis of this research. Based on Languilaire (2009), this research deductively describes which tactics entrepreneurs/self-employed people are using to manage the relations between their life domains in a satisfying way, i.e. in line with their strategy. This research is based on qualitative interviews of entrepreneurs/self-employed and qualitative analysis in a form of content analysis. At this date (submission date) data is being processed.

In 1996, Nippert-Eng defined segmentation and integration as opposite while introducing the segmentation-integration continuum in the work- life research. This view affected largely how the relationships between work and non-work have so far been addressed in organisations. On the one side HR policies may favour ”segmentation” between work and non-work and on the side policies may favour ”integration”. Looking at the development of HR policies, it becomes evident that the industrial time favoured the first and that post-industrialisation favoured the second. Nowadays however HR policies combined with the organisational as well as societal discourses jeopardise this simplistic-two-alternative view. On the one hand, general media, political discourse but also in several research (see; Kossek, 2003, Wilson, et al. , 2004; Kylin, 2008) insist on the necessity for employees to ”find” energy while leaving their work behind and not be always in ”work” mode. On the other hand, organisations create flexibility and used IT devices so that work concretely becomes portable (Valcour & Hunter, 2010) and so that “working from home” becomes one organisational norm. The Shakespearian question is thus “to integrate or to segment” and the answer may be for individual: “how do I know, I get both signals”. As a matter of fact, the quality of work/non-work management and its consequences for individual’s well-being is depends foremost on individuals’ perception and interpretation of their contexts. Contexts matter as underlined by Kossek and Lambert (2006), Poelmans (2005), Ollier-Malaterre (2009) as well Languilaire (2009). Three levels of context are generally described in the work-life literature. First, the individual context, where individual’s characteristics as well as family and personal contexts are discussed. Research on the "couple" is an illustration of the individual context research (see Denker & Dougherty, 2013). Second, the organisational context, where the roles of organisational policy and culture are in focused (Ollier-Malaterre, 2009). Third, the societal context where the role of national (den Dulk et al., 2013) as well as international context are discussed (see Poelmans 2005). Hence a fit between the individuals’ work/non-work preferences for segmentation or integration and their individual, organisational and societal contexts should ease boundary management. In work-life domains, this refers to the person-environment fit framework (see Edwards & Rothbard, 1999) where a fit should result in a higher degree of satisfaction and well-being. For Edwards and Rothbard (1999), Kossek et al. (1999), Desrochers and Sargent (2003) a misfit implies that individuals are dissatisfied and are perpetually searching for ways to make things better. Such ongoing quest process can be stressful and thus have negative effects on individual’s wellbeing. As today’s working life de facto is composed of a ”dual” work-life discourse at diverse levels, individuals’ understanding and sense-making is central for their well-being This paper ought thus to discuss how individuals are coping with the complexity and duality of the “work-life discourse” that is de facto part of working life.