Abstract: Work in the information age is fundamentally
different to work in the industrial age economy but social structures,
working practices, the legislative environment and academic research
all have to cope with old and new economy working being in existence
side by side. Standard working in the new economy is increasingly
being replaced by non-standard or flexible working and is no
longer the norm. Although new economy flexible working is not
(yet) fully defined its main characteristics can be identified.
Current research is reviewed suggesting it does not deal adequately
with the differences especially with the pace of change of technology.
The paper analyses data collected by government agencies and
sponsored bodies in the UK. It considers research activities
into flexible working and discusses their focus on the traditional
family models, gender issues and exploitation of the work-force
and argues that insufficient account has been taken of changes
to employment within an information society.
1. Introduction
Achieving a fully flexible
labour force - that is the ability to employ and pay at normal
rates just sufficient labour to meet the workload at any point
in time, has been a goal of employers for as long as the concept
of paying for labour has existed. There are many mechanisms by
which the goal is pursued and many constraints to achieving it.
Issues arise such as: is there a sufficient pool of available
labour? In order to guarantee a sufficient supply at times of
high demand is it necessary to pay for unused labour at times
of slack demand? Is this driven by unfettered market forces alone,
collective agreements, government regulation or all of these.
Over what time scale is labour flexibility required? Is flexibility
in place needed also? Can the labour force be used for a variety
of tasks to balance variations in demand for individual specific
tasks (demarcation and functional flexibility)? Is it possible
to de-skill tasks and utilise flexible labour for the unskilled
element? What is the relationship between the fixed and variable
costs of labour and utilisation of capital resources of land
and equipment? These and other questions have been the subject
of research and the answers to such questions determine an employer's
approach to flexible labour provision. They were the same questions
and issues facing Lloyd's as we sought to introduce flexible
working in our back office so we could respond to the demands
of an increasingly global competitive, e-enabled 24/7 market
for international insurance.
This paper first examines the
working environment from the industrial revolution onwards with
emphasis on flexible working. It considers research into flexible
working over the past twenty years and suggests that there is
need to adapt and re-interpret research in the light of changing
socio-economic circumstances. This need is not merely of academic
concern. This author's interest is as a research associate at
a UK university but also as a senior manager of Lloyd's, charged
with finding an effective solution to the problem of matching
skilled labour resources to demand. In searching for a solution
we considered academic and business based research, the legislative
and fiscal environment, what could be achieved with current technology
and the wishes and motivations of our staff. What we found surprised
us. We expected that the greatest problems would come from the
last of these - technological and staff issues. In fact, we found
that our staff recognised the need for change and were open to
it; the technology we needed existed and was improving all the
time. What we could not find was convincing academic research
to support the business case, or to guide us as to how to implement
a flexible working programme. We found too that the legislative
and fiscal environment, including on taxation and social security,
within which we had to operate was firmly rooted in the industrial
age. All were not keeping up with the pace of change we were
experiencing in our real world.
This paper argues that a step
change is taking place in the world of work evidenced by a move
away from a norm of full-time permanent employment at one location.
The academic community is in a position to take a macro view
of this change, and moreover to influence governments, disseminate
good practice, and identify and suggest answers to questions
raised about work in an emerging new economy. But first the community
must recognise that the new economy exists, albeit side by side
with the old, and must direct its research accordingly. This
is a challenge that has yet to be met.
2. Setting the Scene from
the First Industrial Revolution Onwards
The nineteenth century gave
us cities, defined work places, security of employment and nuclear
families (Cassells 2001). The 20th century gave us mass production
(Fordism) and replacement of agriculture as the dominant mode
of production, measured by number of employees. This development
of the industrial economy during the last 200 years is often
described in terms of three successive industrial revolutions
(Magnusson 2000). The first saw the introduction of the factory
system, many jobs were changed beyond recognition and new work
was created. The second industrial revolution is characterised
by mass production so as to reduce production costs and realise
economies of scale. It was fuelled by a mass market for relatively
homogenous consumer goods. Work was directed from above by a
system of scientific management or Taylorism - or, to use a broader
term, the rationalisation movement. This had the effect of concentrating
people and capital in large production units with production
lines operating at fixed times, often over two or three shifts
in the working day and requiring manual intervention to progress
the work piece. Even where people were not directly concerned
with manufacturing, they had to work in the same locations and
at the same time as colleagues to ensure they had access to the
necessary information and support resources. All of this created
a favourable environment for employment of large numbers of people
at one location on a fixed hours basis performing a specific
unchanging function and in return the employer was prepared to
offer - or an organised and politicised workforce was able to
extract - security of employment in the form of a permanent employment
contract, protection of demarcation and premium payment for limited
temporal flexibility in the form of paid overtime.
In most countries this second
industrial revolution was accompanied by high rates of economic
growth which continued into the 1970s. In the 1970's oil crises
triggered by the OPEC countries and the Vietnam war were the
catalyst for macro-economic shocks that brought into question
how sustainable this period of growth was in the long term. There
followed an acceleration of slimming down of traditional industry
in the USA and Western Europe, and increases in the level of
unemployment. There has never been a return to full employment
since, although the USA approached it in the late 1990s. The
two events cited may have been the catalyst it seems too that
there may have been longer term factors beginning to make their
impact and which bring into doubt the extent to which the concepts
and models used to describe the second industrial revolution
and normal employment match present reality.
These emerging factors are
firstly, globalisation of the world economy and industrial growth
in areas outside of traditional industries, along with an accompanying
trend for national tariff barriers to be removed and deregulation
of the financial markets. A consequence is a heightening of international
competition and constraints upon the economic and social policies
of national governments, including in relation to employment
(Collins 2000). The second factor is an explosion in the pace
of introduction of technological innovations, especially in the
microelectronics (ICT) sector, of itself a necessary concomitant
of globalisation. In a short space of time this has led to new
industries providing a new range of goods and services and changes
to existing industries' way of working and work organisation.
Thirdly, consumers have learned to be more demanding, rejecting
the homogeneity of lifestyles that mass consumption to a large
extent required (Jensen 1999). The demand for more rapid change
in production and the manufacture of more models, brand variations
and differentiated products and thereby shorter or more sophisticated
production runs, has come to be an increasingly important competitive
issue in the market place. The result is emphasis on "lean
production" and "just-in-time" processes and less
on a Fordist approach of 'any colour so long as it's black'.
Of course, ICT developments here too have reduced the cost of
product differentiation, thus reinforcing both the supply side
and demand side for an increase in customer choice.
The traditional manufacturing
sector measured as a share of GNP and in terms of numbers employed
has declined in all mature industrial economies (Coyle 1998).
At the same time the service sector has expanded strongly, albeit
often supporting industrial processes. Many of these new services
are in fact industry-related services. For example an in-house
design team working for a manufacturer would likely be counted
within manufacturing industry. A design consultancy providing
the same services as an outsourced supplier would be part of
the service sector. So although it would be premature to speak
of the end of the industrial society there nevertheless has been
a marked change in the way in which goods and services are purchased
in the business to business sector as well as a change in consumer
behaviour already mentioned.
In this environment work is
now less geographically restricted than in the past. ICT development
means that even people who work together do not necessarily have
to be in the same place and opportunities for new decentralised
intra-company work organisation are increased. Inter-company
co-operation too potentially becomes easier and thus a higher
proportion of tasks can economically be outsourced. Also, much
service work is not dependent on co-ordination at a specific
point in time offering more opportunities for time flexibility
in employment. Despite this, much of the academic work on employment
practices sets up as a norm a fixed hours permanent job working
for one employer at one location (or based at one location in
the case of peripatetic work). The truth is this is an illusion
and at best has applied for a short period of time in the history
of industrial work and industrialism. The question that arises
is how normal is the norm, and how is it changing?
3. Counting the Flexible Labour
Force in the United Kingdom
A broad definition of the non-standard
or flexible workforce includes self employed people as well as
part-time and temporary workers. This definition does not include
permanently employed teleworkers, (i.e. where there is flexibility
only in where a function is performed) but otherwise covers everyone
in formal employment who does not conform to the norm described
above. Using this broad definition, the 'flexible workforce'
has, according to the UK Labour Force Survey, increased steadily
over the last 20 years from less than 24% in 1979 to 35 per cent
in 1997 (Robinson 1999). If people on government training schemes
and unpaid family workers are included the figures would be at
least two or three percentage points higher (Watson 1994). Most
of the growth in the first part of this period was in self-employment.
Among employees, part-time workers increased in numbers while
full-time workers hardly increased at all. From the employers'
point of view, only temporary workers incontestably increase
flexibility over labour. Temporary workers increased only slightly
in numbers during the 1980s (Casey, 1991), but more rapidly in
the early 1990s, reaching a total of 1.5 million (14.8%) in Spring
1995, compared with 1.25 million (11%) in 1983 (Casey et al 1997).
The percentages shown represent the percentage of temporary workers
as related to the total workforce on the dates specified. By
1997 this had risen a further percentage point to 15.8% (Robinson
1999).
With reasonable confidence
therefore, the current UK recorded work-force can said to be
characterised as being around 60% working in full-time permanent
jobs, 12.5% self-employed, 16% in full or part-time temporary
jobs and the remainder in permanent, part-time jobs. Overall,
females are close to parity in numbers with males but represent
a significantly majority of those in part-time employment and
a slight majority of those in temporary jobs (Robinson 1999).
In other words, 40% of the workforce and a majority of female
workers do not conform to a norm of work in full time permanent
paid employment. If unrecorded (black economy) workers and flexibility
in place as well as time and function is included, and the number
of teleworkers are added to the total, at about 7% (Huws et al
2000) then people who conform to the so-called norm form barely
half the work-force and the proportion is falling.
3.1 Who is Driving the Change?
Do employers create the
flexible firm?
The 'flexible firm' is often
described as one that chooses to divide its labour force into
a core of permanent workers performing the key tasks and a periphery
of non-standard workers. Peripheral workers include casual and
temporary employees, freelancers and other subcontractors. Those
in the latter group protect the core group from changes in demand.
The model was articulated by Atkinson et al (1985) and following
Atkinson, much of the work centred around establishing if there
was indeed an increase in flexible (non-standard) working and
whether this indicated a new approach by employers (Atkinson
and Meager, 1986; Pollert, 1988; Hakim, 1987).
To help answer this and related
questions, the Employment Department of the UK government commissioned
a number of studies (case studies and a major survey) known as
the Employers' Labour Use Strategies (ELUS). The ELUS project
concluded that few employers were adopting a new flexibility
strategy. Rather, most non-standard employment was used for traditional
reasons, as a reaction to changes in demand levels or for non-permanent
or recurring tasks or simply because sufficient full-time, permanent
employees were unavailable (Wood and Smith, 1987; McGregor and
Sproull, 1991; Hunter and Maclnnes, 1991). More recent reviews
of the literature have arrived at similar conclusions (Beatson,
1995). There was no substantial evidence of a general trend for
employers to move consciously to a core-periphery model which
would have explained the growth in non-standard employment. If
the 'Atkinson' model has validity then at least towards the end
of the 20th century, it was at the margin only. This work needs
to be repeated in the 21st century, anecdotal evidence at least
suggests that employers are increasingly taking a strategic rather
than a tactical approach to flexible resourcing.
Other Explanations
Recently, more research has
approached the phenomena from the other angle, that is from the
perspective of the employee to address the question: Is there
evidence of a positive strategy by large numbers of employees
to eschew conventional employment contracts in favour of flexible
ones? If so, is this linked to the growth in the proportion of
women in the labour force and a desire to find better ways, especially
by working mothers and carers, of reconciling family and domestic
roles with paid work? (Brannen et al, 1994). There is ample evidence
of a growth in part-time employment coinciding with the increase
in the proportion of women in the workforce (Felstead and Jewson
1999) and given that a greater proportion of women work part-time
than men it would be easy to conclude that so far as temporal
flexibility was concerned, the growth was as a result of employee
election.
It is also possible however,
that increases in non-standard patterns reflect shifts in employment
to sectors where the use of flexible labour was most common,
or as a result of tactical changes by employers to the change
in the regulatory environment, power of trades unions, and even
simply in changes in the way of counting the numbers. For example,
many casual workers in the building trades industries were re-defined
as (labour only) sub contractors as a result of tax avoidance
legislation.
3.2 More Recent DFEE Research
The Department for Employment
and Education, the successor of the Employment Department, has
funded a number of studies in recent years to shed light on developments
in non-standard and flexible working practices. The most recent
is Work-Life Balance 2000: Base line Study of Work-Life balance
practices in Great Britain (Hogarth 2000). This complemented
two 1997 studies Family-Friendly Working Arrangements in Britain,
1996, (Forth et at 1997) and a more broadly focused DfEE sponsored
study by the Policy Studies Institute: Employers' use of flexible
labour (Casey et al 1997). The broad study by Bernard Casey and
colleagues explored:
- the extent to which non-standard
working practices were used in different types of workplace
- changes over time in the use
of non-standard working practices by different types of workplace
- employers' reasons for using
various non-standard working practices and for changes in their
level and use over time
- the perceived advantages and
disadvantages to employers of the different types of working-time
practice and employment contract
- the constraints which employers
face on exercising greater flexibility in the use of labour
- likely future trends in the
use of non-standard work arrangements
Casey et al analysed large-scale survey datasets supported by
case study work in a range of employers. The datasets selected
were the Workplace Industrial Relations Surveys (WIRS), and the
Labour Force Surveys (LFS). Both are longitudinal serial surveys
that collect nationally representative data. The Workplace Industrial
Relations Surveys collect (amongst other things) information
provided by employers on the use of non-standard working practices
at the level of the employing establishment.
In contrast to earlier work,
they concluded that growth was due to changes in employers' practices
rather than due to a change in the industrial or occupational
composition of the economy. The growth in temporary work and
the use of variable hours was, they said, almost wholly attributable
to a change in employers' practices, although a growth in industries
which traditionally employed part-timers was responsible for
some of the growth in part-time employment. They found too that
organisations that were otherwise similar, employed different
approaches to flexibility suggesting there is scope for choice,
but that other things being equal, employers had a preference
for full-time, permanent employment.
The other two studies collected
more recent data but took a more narrow view of flexibility,
that is of flexible practices available with some degree of election
or choice by employees. Forth and colleagues discovered that
92% of establishments they reviewed claimed to provide some kind
of elective flexible working or 'family-friendly' working practice.
They examined four categories of provisions, namely maternity
leave or maternity pay (in excess of the statutory minimum),
paternity leave (paid or unpaid), childcare-related provisions
and flexible or non-standard working arrangements. For the present
discussion the last category is of particular interest, and Forth
et al found that of six types of flexible or non-standard working
time arrangements, each was available in only a minority of workplaces:
| Arrangement |
% of establishments offering
it |
| flexible hours for PT employees |
41% |
| flexible hours for FT employees |
36% |
| permanent switch from FT
to PT work |
24% |
| temporary switch from FT
to PT work |
22% |
| non-standard FT working
week |
15% |
| term-time contracts |
7% |
Just two or three years later
the percentage of employers embracing elective temporal flexible
working appears to have risen. A joint study by the Family Policy
Studies Centre (FPSC) and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation reports
a figure of 71% (Dex ed. 1999), although differences in the sample
and definition of flexible working might account for some of
the rise. Similarly with the same caveats the later DfEE baseline
study found that over 60% of employers in the UK now allow at
least some staff to work flexible hours with comparable increases
to the proportion allowing switches between full and part-time
work (Hogarth et al 2000).
What emerges from these major
UK surveys is a picture of flexibility in the workforce which
is complex and changing over time with an overall trend for 'abnormal'
employment to tend towards parity with the post war tradition
of what represents normal employment. Simple models such as Atkinson's
flexible firm are inadequate to describe what is happening and
economic determinism, employee choice, and probably simple fashion
also play a part.
4. A New Paradigm, Familiar
Questions
4.1 The Past is no Guide
Something that should be clear
from the foregoing, although often not acknowledged with some
exceptions (US Department of Transportation 1992), is that the
past is not a reliable guide to the future. Research is carried
out in a rapidly changing and uncertain environment. Factors
which play a part in this uncertainty are industrial and social
re-structuring but above all the pace of technological development.
ICT developments mean that things that were expensive to do have
become cheaper by orders of magnitude within a single decade,
for example mobile telephony. Much of the research reviewed above
was based on data collected before the internet was transformed
by the adoption of HTML (and now XML) into the world-wide-web,
and, for example, before the total number of email addresses
in use in the UK first exceeded the number of households. Yet
these tools and others such as the prospect of low cost, high
bandwidth digital domestic networking via ADSL or fixed radio,
and high speed internet access via mobile radio or GPRS or third
generation mobile telephony (UMTS), influence the progression
of flexible working not only indirectly through their effect
on production processes, but also directly and their development
and application is changing faster than the research can record
them.
This factor seems highly significant
when the question is asked in research. In work on telecommuting
Hartman et al found that high levels of satisfaction with 'technical
support' were directly related to higher levels of overall satisfaction
and the closer the employer can come to matching at-home technical
capabilities with those available at work, the more favourable
are telecommuters' reactions (Hartman et al 1992). This study
like many others is open to the criticism of small sample size
and uncritical associations of responses with conclusions, which
the authors acknowledge. The fact is however, that the ability
to 'stretch the desktop' so that the home pc and phone operate
as in the work-place or to migrate all electronic functions to
the internet so that 'the office is the network', are both in
reality twenty-first century concepts and though some are, many
organisations are not ready to embrace them even if the ICT infrastructure
in the territories in which they operate, can support them (Crichton
2001).
4.2 A View of the Future
As we move from the second
to the third industrial revolution (variously described as a
new economy, or information society or age) many employees will
experience a work life very different to the norm of the past.
Old economy working is a product of the industrial revolution
and the Taylorist age. Like most fashion or trends, the fact
that something new has now emerged which is capable of being
labelled, studied and analysed becomes apparent only at a distance.
For example, it is only at a distance that the society-changing
trend for women to approach equality of numbers in the labour
force caused partly by a post-war propensity of women to return
to work after childbirth (Callender et al 1987) can be analysed.
Aspects of the phenomena become clearer with time: (availability
of low cost domestic labour saving devices; the self reinforcing
phenomena of increased home ownership aided by inherited capital
and ever more sophisticated and accessible means of financing
it; shift of labour from manufacturing to services, from physical
to mental labour; the post-war effect of shortage of male labour
and new found capacity of female labour; universal secondary
education; longevity and life beyond child rearing and so on).
All of these form part of what the Future Foundation calls 'coping
with androgyny' (The Future Foundation 2000) and it is only after
the passage of a generation that the scope and causes of the
phenomena become apparent.
There is a new economy paradigm
emerging. In relation to flexible employment the question then
is: What exactly is 'new economy' flexible working and how is
it different from old economy working?
As with gender parity, the
factors which define and explain the new economy phenomena including
flexible working will be clear in time even if not clear now
- although many claim already to have such insights (Castells
1996, Anderla et al 1997, Hochschild 1997, Coyle 1998, Friedman
1999, Jensen 1999 and many others). But even if these factors
and definitions are not clear to all now, this is no reason to
deny a reality that flexible working in the future world is different
in fundamental ways to flexible working in the past world. It
is a product of the knowledge based society just as old economy
flexible working is a product of the industrial age society.
And because new economy flexible working is not yet fully defined
or its features understood, does not mean that its main characteristics
cannot be identified.
First amongst these characteristics
is a move from jobs being location dependent to becoming location
independent (location independent working - LIW) and the consequent
effects. Effects of LIW are summarised succinctly by N. Ben Fairweather
et al in work funded by the Economic and Social Research Council
(ESRC) (Fairweather et al 2000). The next characteristic is that
of time independence of the work being done and accessibility
to a support infrastructure at any time. Access to an office
email server at 10.00pm in the evening offers freedom to work
at times other than conventional office hours but may lead to
an expectation by superiors, colleagues and self not that email
can be accessed late in the evening but that it will be (Gordon
2001).
A third characteristic is availability
of information and the issues this raises - also not all necessarily
beneficial. For example, the problem of information overload
induced stress (Lau 1998) or information used to replace mutual
trust between employer and employee (Gooday 1998). Next, past
work on gender issues in old economy working may not provide
comparable insights in the new. Indeed, in 1990 Ursula Huws wrote,
"although not exclusively so, the study of flexible workers
is overwhelmingly a study of women workers" (Huws 1990)
Yet, as Huws herself discovered in her analysis of the most recent
Labour Force Survey the majority of those enjoying spatial flexibility,
teleworkers, are male (Huws et al 2001). Certainly there are
gender issues relevant to a study of new economy flexible working,
but they are not the same as those relevant to the old economy.
A fifth related characteristic is the increasing androgyny of
the work force coupled with the belief that, for many people,
a single income is no longer sufficient to support a family (Handy
2001) and a socio-economic view that an economy would benefit
if members of the society combined working with parenthood. This
is the view of the current UK Government. Comparing unfavourably
the relatively high proportion of non-working parents in the
UK to that of continental Europe and the USA, the recent DTI
green paper states "The UK still has 3.1 million non-working
parents with children under 16, most of whom are mothers, primarily
with a child under 5. The economy would benefit significantly
if more of these parents chose to join the labour market"
(DTI 2000 p9).
Next, are issues relating to
a potential increased polarisation of the work force between
those who can benefit from flexibility in the new economy and
those who may not (Coyle 1998, Jackson 1999, Rosenberg and Lapidus
1999). Certainly it can be argued that there is such a danger,
and researchers can point to an apparently widening gap between
the lowest and highest paid in countries with the most developed
ICT infrastructures (Diane Coyle calls these two groups 'operatives'
and 'superstars'). In similar vein Magnusson (2000) suggests
we can soon expect to see a division of the labour market into
five parts:
1. A high skills sector of
industrial and service production with a high level of value-added,
relatively high earnings and employee driven job flexibility
2. Traditional industrial manufacturing with relatively low wages
and high risk of unemployment
3. The existing public services sector, also subject to wage
pressure preserving its traditional status as low paid, but perhaps
with the increasing removal of the compensating factor of high
job security
4. An increasing low skills service sector, also with low wages,
high employer controlled job flexibility and high risk of unemployment
or temporary lay-offs
5. What Magnusson calls 'the excluded' that is those in long
term unemployed, people in early retirement, those with temporary
employment, those who study due to a lack of other occupation,
people on social benefits, etc.
What is unclear and little
researched, is whether this would be a permanent feature or merely
a temporary one during a period of adjustment. It might be that
wages of the lowest paid in a mature information age society
might rise from an initial low as the checks and balances of
the market place and political intervention take hold. In relation
to the latter, some think that even in a global economy the power
of governments to intervene is not as circumscribed as is sometimes
suggested (Glyn 1998, Matthews 1998), and it is possible to point
to a parallel with early industrial age relative earnings rising
over time.
Finally, but by no means the
least significant, some researchers point to differences between
new and old economy organisational styles, cultures and management
structures. For example, Mahlon Apgar IV distinguishes 'informational'
organisations and 'industrial' organisations with the distinction
referring to management style and philosophy rather than to an
economic sector or customer base (Apgar 1998). Similarly, Gregory
Dess et al discuss and distinguish three innovative types of
organisation which they call 'modular', 'virtual' and 'barrier-free'
(Dess et al 1995). (A trend away from industrial management styles
and organisations being supplanted may be evidenced by the findings
of the Labour Force Survey discussed above, that is that the
fastest expanding teleworking occupation is management.)
5. Discussion and Conclusion
The 1970s economic shock resulted
in higher levels of unemployment in most industrialised countries
than had been seen for a generation, certainly since the depression
years of the 1930s. Those countries which during recent years
have more obviously succeeded in bringing down their levels of
unemployment - for instance the United States, the Netherlands
and Great Britain - have managed to achieve substantial growth
in more qualified jobs in the industrial and service sectors
while at the same time boosting the number of jobs in the low-wage,
intensive service sector. As the research cited above shows this
has been accompanied by an increase in flexible working and there
is at least a prime facie case that the two are related.
The research shows too that
working life is changing and change is continuing. There seems
no reason to doubt that the service sector will continue to increase
its relative share of people in employment. For traditional manufacturing
industry intense cost pressure and price competition may well
result in more outsourcing of simpler tasks within the industry
to subcontractors, and a continued reduction of 'normally' employed
people. The jobs that will increase are likely to be those requiring
relatively high skills or qualification and jobs with a high
service content.
It follows therefore, that
existing research needs to be re-evaluated against an over-arching
principle. This is that what used to be true may no longer be
true, and the target which researchers are trying to hit is moving,
and moving quickly. Research into flexible working often does
not recognise that there is a paradigm shift taking place resulting
from these changes. Rules, attitudes and values that applied
in industrial age society are not adequate or appropriate to
a post industrial age one. It is suggested that only by distinguishing
new economy flexible working from old economy flexible working
will insights be gained which are useful in development of new
rules, attitudes and values.
Technology is the enabler but
the key drivers for growth of interest are economic and social.
Employers see flexible working as a way of remaining competitive
in the globalised e-enabled 24/7 society. Successful enterprises
must be able to respond quickly to changing conditions (Porter
1996, Kelly 1998), a need satisfied in part by the move to more
flexible relationships with individuals, but which in the future
is also driving the development of 'virtual organisations'. Social
and personal drivers arise from the breakdown of the two parent,
one income nuclear family (Booth 1996, Future Foundation 2000,
Hogarth 2000), and the desire to reduce commuting, which itself
has continued to grow at an exponential rate, wasting time, money
and energy and causing pollution.
Flexible working does not raise
many new questions. Those which are often raised in this context
such as: how are people motivated? or how may a corporate culture
be nurtured in individuals employees? or how can the organisation
ensure that the knowledge and skills of those individuals passes
into the collective learning of the organisation? or how can
staff, used to having their time managed and supervised, learn
how to manage their own time and way of working? are all questions
that apply to any business, but may not be asked in traditional
organisations being obscured by established practices and structures
which everyone takes for granted. Of course, although these questions
are not new, the answers or solutions are, and some questions
assume a greater importance than before. In particular, people
working at home may suffer feelings of isolation, not just in
social terms, but also in relation to career opportunities and
the absence of an office grapevine from which they have traditionally
gleaned useful information about the development of the business.
To address these issues researchers
need to free themselves from pre-conceptions of the 'norm'. Stereotyped
views of flexible working as either a means of exploitation of
a reluctant (largely female) workforce or as an abnormal way
of working need to be discarded, or at least, re-evaluated. Researchers
must distinguish between the old and the new paradigms in their
research subjects, admittedly a difficult task because they co-exist,
and many cannot or do not search for the distinction or even
acknowledge its existence. Nevertheless, it is argued that the
distinction must be made, and the paper has attempted also to
make a contribution towards a debate on how to do so.
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