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Theory of Flexible Systems Management

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Flexible Work Organizations

Part of the book series: Flexible Systems Management ((FLEXSYS))

Abstract

Flexible systems management has been evolving as a paradigm and has taken a more concrete shape, particularly, in the last two decades. A large number of perspectives and frameworks are linked with it. The term flexibility has been defined by various researchers in different contexts in a different manner. Various types of flexibilities in an organization are treated as strategic flexibility , organizational flexibility , people flexibility , operations flexibility , marketing flexibility, financial flexibility , information system flexibility , decision flexibility and so on. Though all these developments contribute towards a theoretical basis of the paradigm of flexible systems management, a well defined and comprehensive theory in this regard is still lacking. This chapter is an attempt to identify the building blocks of flexible systems management and their relationships and causality. This contributes towards answering the fundamental questions of theory building, i.e. ‘what’, ‘how’ and ‘why’. The building blocks of flexible systems management are identified as: the situation, actor, process, proactive/reactive flexibility , internal/external flexibility, flexibility maturity , learning, action and performance. The chapter provides a critical appraisal of all the building blocks and relationships among them, which can be tested as a full-fledged theory in due course.

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  1. Department of Management Studies, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, Vishwakarma Bhawan, Shaheed Jeet Singh Marg, New Delhi, 110016, India

    Sushil

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  1. Department of Management Studies, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi, India

    Sushil

  2. University of Technology Sydney, Ultimo, New South Wales, Australia

    Julia Connell

  3. Curtin Business School (CBS), Curtin University, Perth, West Australia, Australia

    John Burgess

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Sushil (2016). Theory of Flexible Systems Management. In: Sushil, Connell, J., Burgess, J. (eds) Flexible Work Organizations. Flexible Systems Management. Springer, New Delhi. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-2834-9_1

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