Labour Market Change and the Organisation of Work

Abstract

The current fixation with flexibility rests on the twin assumptions that management will react clearly and strategically to a set of external stimuli and that there will be one best way of resolving difficulties thrown up by changed circumstances, producing a strategy that can be unproblematically implemented. This latter assumption holds largely because workers in this approach are treated rather like a pliable lump, able to be dissected and shaped at management’s command with little resistance.