Mind the Gap: Flexibility, Epistemology and the Rhetoric of New Work

This article explores Bateson's definition of flexibility as 'uncommitted potential for change', relating it to contemporary issues and scienti.c controversies and thereby showing the huge, largely untapped potential of the concept. The main empirical example is the 'new economy', where the term .exibility is used aggressively to advertise its virtues. However, it is argued, .exible work tends to render the worker more flexible in relation to space, but less .exible regarding time. This illustrates another point in Bateson's analysis of .exibility, namely that .exibility gained in one domain tends to reduce .exibility in another. The ensuing problems are familiar enough - fragmentation, alienation, stress - but poorly understood, and Bateson's flexibility concept makes it possible, in fact, to deal with the unintentional side-effects of 'new work' as a kind of environmental problem.