Flexibility in Britain during the 1980s: Recent Empirical Evidence

Abstract

In recent years there has been an increasing literature that has argued that Britain is experiencing an increase in ‘flexibility’. Newspaper commentaries¹ and various surveys² have suggested that the ‘Thatcher decade’ has been characterised by the advent of the ‘flexible firm’. This line of reasoning received a major boost with the publication of a report by the Institute for Manpower Studies at Sussex University for the National Economic Development Office (NEDO) in 1986. The NEDO Report, Changing Working Patterns by Atkinson and Meager, has become the cornerstone of an increasingly ideological, polemical and fractious debate about the nature of contemporary socio-economic structures.³ However, few, if any, have scrutinised either its empirical evidence or its central methodological underpinnings. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a careful examination of the evidence provided by Atkinson and Meager and then to contrast their theses with the results of a survey of 954 establishments undertaken as part of the UK Economic and Social Research Council’s (ESRC) Social Change and Economic Life Research Initiative in 1986 and 1987.