The Question Of Flexibility

Flexibility has become a buzz word in the 1980s. It has been seen as crucial to improvements in productivity. It has been cited as a prominent example of how markets have been made to “work better” and how changed market forces surrounding firms have produced changed working arrangements within firms. In a number of articles, Atkinson and his colleagues have argued that employers have developed a new “flexible firm” manpower strategy. It has an inner “core” of stable, skilled employees with secure employment and good conditions. Here flexibility is qualitative. Traditional craft demarcations are relaxed and workers are trained to be multi‐skilled. Around the core is an outer layer of peripheral workers with poorer conditions more directly determined by the market and with security of employment dependent on how busy the firm is. Here flexibility is quantitative. In addition the firm may employ other still more peripheral groups: temporary workers on short‐term contracts, part‐time workers, trainees on special government schemes. Finally, the firm may depend less on direct employment. It can subcontract to specialised suppliers of services, to self‐employed workers, rely more on out‐sourcing and so on. The overall effect is to rely far more on the market to bring different aspects of production together, rather than to rely on management in a much larger production unit organising everything with its own workforce.