Flexible working times: towards a new employment relationship?
(2005) 4th International Conference on Critical Management Studies Proceedings — Location: Cambridge, UK
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- Abstract
- (en) Among practices of flexibility, some affects particularly the spatial and temporal dimensions of work. Far from the “fordist arrangement”, working time becomes “burst, diversified and malleable”. Spatial and temporal framework of work constitutes a major ‘lever’ for management practices. The stake of such flexible practices appears to be the available time : managers seek to inc rease it and employees try to better balance work and family duties. This contribution aims at understanding how those flexible practices make sense for groups and employees; how its uses are perceived and justified and; how the employment relationship is finally reorganized or re -constructed by actors. This enquiry is based on two empirical investigations situated in two different contexts: the food retail sector and the IT sector. Beyond the inherent limits in many points with the comparison of two diverg ent objects, the analysis reveals similarities regarding consequences that these practices of flexibility generate on the employment relationship. Beyond dominant interpretative registers of ‘flexibility’ we identify – natural process or opportunity to balance various temporalities (household and work) – this paper points out the emergence of a new employment relationship , by mobilizing the ‘implicit’ social contract, which reflects the understandings between employer and employee about their respective c ontributions. Results bring us to (a) reconsider the spatial and temporal framework, which is characterised by a greater and unbounded temporal availability for employees, whereby space also gets a new signification; (b) understand the employment relations hip in a more individualized, informal and interpersonal way and; (c) re -think the collective dimension of those work arrangements in order to understand and develop adapted processes of regulation.
- Affiliations
Louvain School of Management Strategy and Organisation
Citations
Taskin, L., & Schots, M. (2005). Flexible working times: towards a new employment relationship? 4th International Conference on Critical Management Studies Proceedings, Cambridge, UK. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/225935