Theory and Practice of Flexible Work: Organizational and Individual Perspectives. Introduction to the Special Issue

Over the last decades, scholars have paid consistent attention to the concepts of flexible work. This reflects the growing relevance of flexible work patterns in practice. The general assumption is that flexible work arrangements enable an organization to adapt its workforce to changes in the working environment, which is mainly based on Atkinson’s (1984) groundbreaking ‘flexible firm’ model. In practice, we increasingly observe flexible work time arrangements and non-standard working conditions (e.g. ‘temps’ or contract workers). If flexibility enables organizations to adapt to changing demands from the environment from the organizational perspective the key issue of flexible work is to allocate the work force to the varying requirements of customers or production. From the employee perspective flexibility means to have options to choose, when, for how long and for which employer the employee wants to work. Both can be achieved by contractual flexibility (temporary employment, contract work) and by temporal and spatial flexibility (overtime, on-call work, flexitime, telecommuting). However, statements that follow the assumption that ‘rigidity is dysfunctional; flexibility, functional’ (Pollert, 1991, p. 9) fall short. This assumption is neither valid on the individual employee level nor on the organizational level. From a systemic perspective (Sennet, 1998), flexibility for one side (e.g. the organization) may often lead to constraints for the other side (e.g. the employee). Flexibility for an organization does not automatically imply flexibility in terms of decision latitude for employees. To cope with this paradox, scholars (e.g. Höge, 2011; Hornung, Herbig & Glaser, 2008; Reilly,