Beyond the DINK label: managing work-life balance as childfree dual-career couples

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine how childfree dual-career professional couples (DCPCs) engage in boundary management in the context of work-life balance, and how their strategies are shaped by the organizational norms in which couples are embedded. Drawing on boundary theory, the study explores how boundary management is enacted not only individually but relationally, at the dyadic level. Design/methodology/approach The study adopts a qualitative, abductive design based on semi-structured interviews with 21 childfree dual-career couples, with each partner interviewed separately and the couple analysed as the unit of analysis. Boundary theory served as the principal sensitizing concept, while the analytic structure emerged from the data. Findings The findings reveal that childfree DCPCs actively manage work-life boundaries, and that their strategies are organized along four continuums: boundary management (integration to segmentation), negotiation (compromise to collaboration), planning initiation (individual to joint) and flexibility orientation (tasks to time). Four couple types, careerist, conventional, non-conventional and egalitarian, occupy different positions along these continuums and couples adopting the same nominal strategy often did so for different reasons. Boundary strategies were further shaped by organizational expectations, particularly an ideal-worker norm that presumes childfree employees to be continuously available. Practical implications The findings suggest that organizations should decouple boundary entitlements from parental status and address the informal ideal-worker culture through which childfree employees are presumed available and penalized for protecting their boundaries, supporting work-life balance more equitably across all household configurations. Originality/value The study advances boundary theory by reconceptualizing boundary management as a set of relational continuums rather than discrete individual tactics and by demonstrating that it is co-constructed not only between partners but between couples and their organizations. It challenges the managerial assumption that childfree employees are inherently more available, reframing their perceived availability as the product of invisible boundary work.