Institutions, Production and Working Life – Edited by Geoffrey Wood and Phil James
| Author | Peter Scott |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.2007.00655.x |
| Published date | 01 December 2007 |
| Date | 01 December 2007 |
employers and/or workers?’. The literature claiming that flexibility is good for every-
body promotes concepts such as individualism, self-reliance, willingness to accept
risk, or propensity for change. In the ‘new world of work’, workers are supposed to be
focused on customer satisfaction, continuously learning and educating themselves,
being made responsible, and ‘empowered’ with authority to make their own decisions
on problems arising in the work process. Criticism of the inaccuracy in this picture has
pointed out the paradox of a flexible organization with its ‘autonomous’ workers
created in an authoritarian, top-down way by a strong hierarchy of managers. The
literature claiming that flexibility is good for both management and workers lacks
systematic empirical illustrations: it is an ‘evidence-free zone’. Numerous primarily
empirical studies argue that although flexibility is beneficial for employers, the raison
d’être of flexibility, it is in fact bad for workers, who are forced to confront greater
risks, longer hours, increased work-loads and stress. The effects of flexibility are
mainly bad for workers in terms of layoffs, job insecurity and work intensification.
However, it is also argued that flexibility can become bad for both workers and
employers when flexibility-induced worker insecurity reduces worker motivation and
incentives to contribute to the success of the organization. The concept of ‘flexicurity’
highlights the idea of a need to balance flexibility and security, and is often presented
as a pursuit of ‘win–win outcomes’, but Karlsson asserts (chapter 2) that it results in
the fear of the lose–lose outcome of bad flexibility and can lead to increased general
acceptance of flexibility. In chapter 5, A-K Engstrand provides an historical perspec-
tive on the concept of flexicurity as a way of combining flexibility and social protec-
tion, a notion which echoes the discussions that took place in Sweden during the
1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The literature arguing that flexibility is bad for employers and
good for workers is almost non-existent, although findings indicate that front-line
managers do not always regard flexible working time arrangements in a positive light
even if they are beneficial to workers.
The primary conclusion of this book is that flexibility is a double-edged concept. By
juxtaposing two positive terms (flexibility/stability) rather than opposing positive and
negative ones (flexibility/rigidity), it opens a new framework of analysis in which
considerable terminological ambiguity is cleared up. This stimulating book is a strong
contribution to the analysis of flexibilization, the process by which employee insta-
bility in the workplace is being institutionalized. It questions what I call the paradigm
of positive flexibility in an original manner and it is certainly a significant contribution
to the academic and political debates on flexibility.
Beatrice Appay
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Institutions, Production and Working Life edited by Geoffrey Wood and Phil James.
Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006, xii +361 pp., ISBN 0 19 929178 0,
£23.99
This edited volume has an ambitious agenda, as the title implies, in studying the
evolution of work, organizations and labour market institutions, over recent decades.
A central initial concern of the editors is to integrate a number of the main dichoto-
mies in social science research as applied to the study of employment and society.
These concern primarily the relationship between macro versus micro levels of inves-
tigation, the interplay between organizations as actors and the institutional context in
Book Reviews 865
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2007.
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