An overview of flexible working practices[Un panorama des pratiques de flexibilité des modes de travail]

Flexibility in working practices is often presented as a response to contemporary economic and social challenges (Taskin, 2003). Yet this appeal is not self-evident. In fact, flexible work practices stand in stark contrast to the classic way of organizing work, i.e. the one that emerged during the industrial era. The seminal writings on management by authors such as Henri Fayol, Henri Ford and Frederick Winslow Taylor (to name only the best-known and most widely taught) aimed to conceive of an organization of work free of all forms of improvisation, informality and subjectivity. Flexibility (in the sense of the Latin etymology flexibilitas) and indeterminacy in work practices were systematically eliminated in favor of a rational, instrumental organization of work in which tasks, roles and individual performance were defined, ordered, hierarchized and measured.