ABSTRACT
Parental couples are increasingly confronted with high mobility demands in a mobile and digitised world of work. They face the challenge to organise their relationship against the backdrop of frequent times of absence and high expectations of accessibility both with respect to work and to family matters. This paper analyses the meaning of physical and virtual forms of copresence for job-mobile couples with underage children and how they arrange these copresence forms by means of mobile communication media. Using three selected cases, three types of action and coping are reconstructed: first, the type of blended copresence and permeable boundaries, second, the type of focused copresence and unilaterally work-related boundary management, and third, the type of divergent concepts of copresence and unilaterally pair-related boundary management. The analysis shows that mobile communication media play a dual part in the couple relationship of job-mobile parental couples: in physical absence, they serve to create closeness whereas in physical copresence they often produce distance between the partners. A further result is that absence due to job mobility is not necessarily experienced as burdensome but can also be framed as an option to reconcile individual autonomy claims with the needs for couple relationship and family.
