Walls and bridges: towards a multi-disciplinary approach to the concept of flexibility

Abstract

Writers from different academic and functional disciplines and perspectives have analyzed and prescribed the development of flexibility, primarily as a means for enabling organizations to cope with changing competitive conditions. However, there is somewhat little agreement, or even awareness, of what is meant by ‘flexibility’ within and across various fields (e.g. strategic management, organization theory and science and technology studies, and operations management). The degree of confusion and looseness associated with the use of the term ‘flexibility’ has prompted some researchers in one area (organization studies/ industrial relations) to call for a move away from the concept. The purpose of this paper is to consider various treatments of flexibility that reside within the walls of different, disconnected discourses on the notion. By applying a range of concepts which have relevance to flexibility to a reinterpretation of a study of North Sea oil technology, first conducted some years ago, it is intended to examine the bridges that may be built between different reserchers on flexibility approaching the notion from differing vantage points. Recognizing that the strategic management version of flexibility, strategic flexibility, is perhaps the least developed, and the extent to which that field is founded upon borrowing from other academic disciplines, the paper adopts a multi-disciplinary perspective to flexibility, which may contribute to the further development of strategy as an interdisciplinary field.

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