Flexible Work Organisation: Inferences from Britain and Australia

Abstract

Against the background of much debate in Australia and New Zealand aboutmicro-economic reform and award restructuring, this article outlines severalcritical analyses of fragmented work organisation. From eight types of employmentflexibility (summarised in an appendix), it focuses on job flexibility, and argues thatemployers in an adversarial (Type I) industrial relations context tend to have lessjob (functional) flexibility but more numerical flexibility than those in a moreconsensual (Type II) context. Yet there have been recent moves towards greater jobflexibility in Australia, Britain and other English-speaking countries, which can becharacterised as having traditionally provided a predominantly adversarial context.Some such moves have been associated with Japanese influences and new stylesof industrial awards and agreements. The article includes four propositions whichmay guide future research. It proposes longitudinal research on job flexibility, usingan audit of work organisation. Such an audit could be of benefit to practitionersand to those seeking to explain changing forms of work organisation.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 11 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.