Contemporary accounts depict the future of work as flexible, mobile, temporary and mediated by technology. According to some accounts, propagated by many management gurus/consultants and promulgated in parts of the media, organisations will have to become more and more ‘flexible’ in order to survive in an increasingly global, transient and competitive market place: numerical and functional flexibility decrease cost and result in a better match of skills and tasks; structural flexibility allows for quick adaptation to environmental changes; operational flexibility facilitates quick responses to changes in demand and supply. Such overall organisational flexibility is to be matched on the individual level, where individual employees are conceptualised as either being part of a transient workforce to be drawn on or discarded as required by circumstances and the logic of efficiency, or as autonomous entrepreneurs in charge of their own (career) destiny, who trade their skill and expertise in flexible labour markets.

Within these accounts organizations are seen as flexible networks, virtually dispersed in time and space, so that work (and life) activity can be conducted with anybody, at anytime and from anywhere. Organisational agents are conceptualised as fluctuating between discontinuous states of being, ‘structures’ and contexts, and as able to make multiple fresh starts, notwithstanding material, social and economic circumstance. Of course, such accounts have been challenged, and been shown as problematic. Beck (2000) for example investigates the redistribution of risk away from the state and the economy towards the individual. Sennett (1998) describes the disappearance of character in and through the expressants of flexible capitalism, i.e. teamworking and ‘network’structures; this he sees concomitant with flexibility’s inability to give guidance for the conduct of ordinary life. Giddens (1991), perhaps more optimistically, sees individuals cast into freedom from tradition - an ontological position that requires them to become authors of their own lives by keeping a particular narrative of identity going.

Contributors to the stream are invited to critically engage with the ontological/epistemological assumptions of (discourses of) flexibility; the consequences, opportunities and fallacies inherent in such flexible organization of work and lives. We would like to hear accounts about those agents who fluctuate between apparently increasingly permeable boundaries such as immigrant workers/ refugees; displaced/resident working people, housewives/househusbands; foreclosed/included employees; evolving/struggling managers; budding/bankrupt entrepreneurs; people whose skills are becoming obsolete/flourishing – as well as those caught in liminal positions between such categories.

Contributions based on interpretive epistemologies are particularly welcome, because of their ability to explore the construction of experience and the attribution of meaning to flexible work and flexible lives. Such contributions might consider ‘flexibility’ to be socially constructed and therefore to be more adequately described and explored as a process of ‘becoming’. Here, we wonder if experience itself has become subject to fragmentation and disruption, or whether in the flux of experience underlying and stable convictions have held steady. Viewing flexibility as ‘lived experience’, such contributions might explore the processes of how and why ‘flexibility’ has taken such a commanding hold in the vocabulary and practice of management and organisation studies. Such contributions might explore and comment on the consequences of ‘flexibility’ for the emotional and cognitive dispositions of (organisational) agents, at different levels and in different roles, as well as those of significant social others.

Translating such issues into potential thematic contributions to the stream, papers might explore:

The convenors welcome empirical and/or theoretical papers, which engage critically with the topic of flexibility. Our definition of ‘critical’ is inclusive of various theoretical approaches/schools of thinking (e.g. Marxism; feminism; postmodernism); of various ontologies or theoretical positions (e.g. social constructionism; critical humanism) and of a variety of disciplines.

Potential contributors are encouraged to contact us; in particular to discuss possible contributions and ideas which are not listed above. We intend to be flexible!

Each presentation will take 20 minutes. Contributors are invited to present their main ideasbriefly and concisely in 10 minutes to allow for 10 minutes questions per paper (in total per session: 80 minutes). We will be actively discouraging the reiteration of the contents of a full paper, to enable the final 10 minutes of each session to be used for reflection and conversation about issues and themes which straddle the content of the individual contributions. We believe that this use of time will enable more creative and critical thinking amongst the stream participants.

Beck, U. (2000) The brave new world of work. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in Late Modern Age.Cambridge: Polity Press.

Sennett, R. (1998) The corrosion of character: The personal consequences of work in the new capitalism. London: W. W. Norton & Company.

Susanne Tietze
Senior Lecturer in Organisational Behaviour
Nottingham Business School
The Nottingham Trent University
Burton Street
UK Nottingham NG1 4BU
Tel.: ++44 115 848 2661
Email: susanne.tietze@ntu.ac.uk

Diannah Lowry
Senior Research Fellow
The National Institute for Labour Studies
Faculty of Social Sciences
Flinders University
Adelaide
Australia
Tel.: +61 8 8201 2265
Email:Diannah.Lowry@flinders.edu.au

Gill Musson
Lecturer in HRM and Organisational Behaviour
Sheffield University Management School
The University of Sheffield
9 Mappin Street
Sheffield S1 4DT UK
Tel.: +44 114 222 3437
Email: g.musson@sheffield.ac.uk

Julia Richardson
Assistant Professor of Organisational Behaviour
School of Administrative Studies
Atkinson Faculty
York University
Toronto
Ontario M3J 1L1
Canada
Tel.: +1 416 736 2100 ext. 33821
Email: jrichard@yorku.ca

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