Two forms of flexibility need to be distinguished: time sovereignty and flexibility of the employee. The latter involves the unpredictability of working time, as well as work in deviant time slots. The two forms of flexibility are not only different but seem to exclude each other. Jobs characterized by a high degree of time sovereignty tend to imply a low degree of flexibility of the employee, and vice versa. One can also identify various forms of cultural flexibility: religious and philosophical indifference, hedonism or hic-et-nunc orientation, and invidualism of both the utilitarian and expressive variety. These different attitudes or doctrines allow individuals to be flexible with regard to, respectively, the demands and limitations imposed by values or convictions, future consequences of action, and solidarity. These attitudes are interrelated in the sense that indifference, hedonism and individualism are likely to be found in the same person. For that reason one can speak of a cluster of attitudes or a mentality. A high degree of time sovereignty turns out to be negatively related to cultural flexibility. It is therefore quite unlikely that the preferences induced by cultural flexibility cause people to accept or seek flexible jobs, for the kind of flexibility sought would certainly be time sovereignty. The negative relationship between cultural flexibility and time sovereignty suggests that an eventual relationship between the flexibility of work and the flexibility of culture is likely to arise from an adaptation of attitudes to the conditions of employment and to the daily experience of the job. In general, the level of cultural flexibility is lower the higher a person's level of education and temporal sovereignty. Other forms of flexibility, particularly night and weekend work, work with short-notice schedules and unpredictable working days, increase cultural flexibility. People enjoying substantive freedom, i.e. the capacities that come with higher educational levels, the daily experience of autonomy on the job and the advantages of temporal freedom, tend to be much less hedonistic, hic-et-nunc oriented and individualist than others. The fear that flexibility, in the sense of time sovereignty or emancipation, would lead to (hedonistic) individualism and social withdrawal or indifference is clearly unfounded (cf. Bell, 1976; Lipovetsky, 1983). High educational levels, task autonomy, temporal freedom, predictability of one's life course and working time, and work in “normal” time slots tend to go together. When one enjoys one of them, the chances are that one is also privileged enough to enjoy the others. The reverse is of course also true. To be deprived of one increases the likelihood of being deprived of the others. Cultural flexibility therefore appears to be a reaction to deprivation. It seems to be a form of withdrawal of commitment and emotion from a social order in which one is losing out. Such a reaction cannot really be considered a form of resistance, let alone revolt, for its very form makes organized action unlikely. Cultural flexibility rather seems to be the meek acceptance of the flexibilization of one's life for the purpose of economic efficiency and organizational control. Returning to Max Weber's diagnosis of modernity, one can observe that it is a mentality well fitted for living in the iron cage. © 1991, SAGE Publications. All rights reserved.
