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The purpose of this paper is to explore the role that mobile technologies play in mobile workers’ efforts to manage the boundaries between work and non-work domains. Previous theories of work-life boundary management frame boundary management strategies as a range between the segmentation and integration of work-life domains, but fail to provide a satisfactory account of technology’s role.

The authors apply the concept of affordances, defined as the relationship between users’ abilities and features of mobile technology, in two field studies of a total of 25 mobile workers who used a variety of mobile devices and services.

The results demonstrate that the material features of mobile technologies offer five specific affordances that mobile workers use in managing work-life boundaries: mobility, connectedness, interoperability, identifiability and personalization. These affordances persist in their influence across time, despite their connection to different technology features.

The author found that mobile workers’ boundary management strategies do not fit comfortably along a linear segmentation-integration continuum. Rather, mobile workers establish a variety of personalized boundary management practices to match their particular situations. The authors speculate that mobile technology has core material properties that endure over time. The authors surmise that these material properties provide opportunities for users to interact with them in a manner to make the five affordances possible. Therefore, in the future, actors interacting with mobile devices to manage their work-life boundaries may experience affordances similar to those the authors observed because of the presence of the core material properties.

The purpose of this article is to examine the structures and business models of electronic metals exchanges between 1995 and 2003.

A dialectical institutional analysis is applied to understand the exchanges’ responses to competing pressures for efficiency and legitimacy.

Although efficiency is enabled by internet technologies that provide greater information transparency and access, public metals exchanges exhibited less ability to survive than private exchanges. It is argued that private exchanges survived because traders regarded them as more legitimate. Private exchange models allowed existing traditional relationships involving trust and privacy to continue, whereas public exchanges did not.

The institutional analysis complements economic analyses of the role and structure of intermediaries in B2B electronic commerce.