Outcome: Flexible Interaction of Flexible Concepts

The analysis of the dimension of time considers individual as well as economic dimensions of the changing role of time in the restructuring of labor in informational capitalism.

Examples related to the individual aspects of time within labor process are work time concepts and the issue of balancing one’s work and private life. The analysis provided information about the additional flexibility that occurs when flexible work time concepts coexist. Work time concepts based on trust fit right into current developments of labor in informational capitalism, but there are elements of resistance provisos among both employees and some parts of the management against these concepts. Employees fear exploitation by the modern work time concepts and the managers fear a loss of control.

All together, the state of work time concepts today is a flexible interaction of various different kinds of approaches. My case examples are within the software industry, but all indices show that this is the case for many other industries. But, empirical studies also demonstrate that flexible work time concepts are not, as widely believed, an adequate structure to balance work and private life; further they sometimes even counteract this goal. Corporate culture and institutional frameworks influence the functioning of work-life balance approaches in companies. In addition, it is important for the government to support a beneficial synchronization of work and private life, finding a way to match social time arrangements with time arrangements needed by companies (Smentek 1991). The personality of each employee also has a bearing on how he or she solves the problem of balancing out work and private life.

A third example of how labor restructuring concerning the aspect of time affects individuals is the concept of career changes. With changing careers, time is a more important variable then advancement within a hierarchy. The concept of changing careers includes employment status as well as work tasks. For individual career development, both employment status and work tasks are typically more flexible than a few decades ago. The development of careers of software developers can be viewed as precursors of these new career patterns. In software development, the use of modern ICT plays an important role, a trend that is expected to follow in other career fields.

Standardization and regulation of work time represents a decoupling of labor time from the market. New labor time arrangements, which are not highly regulated, can, then, be viewed as a renewing of the coupling of labor time with the market. It is important to differentiate passive from active work time flexibility, because passive

flexibility is associated with negative effects for employees and active flexibility can have positive effects for employees. Furthermore, this difference seen lead to an increasing polarization of the work force because passive flexibility is often applied to the lower end of the workforce whereas highly qualified workers in the upper segment of the workforce are offered flexibility as an option (Lehndorff 2001, 2002).

Concerning temporary employment, as an example of the economic dimension of time as well as concerning turnovers and job tenure, the situations in Germany and the United States are quite distinct from each other. Temporary employment defined as legally arranged temporary employment hardly plays a role in the United States. There, other forms of temporary employment are much more common. All in all, though, temporary employment is associated with decreasing power of employees in regard to their position towards their employers.

Concerning turnover, the different institutional framework in Germany and the United States becomes very important. But a general statement is still possible. If turnovers are a result of economic and company pressure, they have negative effects for employees. If, however, leaving a job is the result of a free decision of the employee, it can be seen as advantageous for the employee. Regarding the effects of turnovers and job tenure on employees, a powerful union can play an important role to avoid negative effects for workers.

A decreasing volume of work over a lifetime represents the overall increasing flexibility within life. Elements like sabbaticals are reasons for institutionalized reduced labor time over lifetime.

Overall, it is important to keep in mind that the development of the role of time in informational capitalism is closely connected with the development of space and pace.

Summary and Future Prospects

Interpreting current changes in the labor process helps to understand today’s society. In this study I concentrated on analyzing developments of the labor process in two countries: the United States and Germany. Both countries are developed nations with a relatively prospering economy. The concept of informational capitalism theoretically describes the economic restructuring of the last decades in these countries.

The concept emphasizes the significant role of information and communication and its technology for prevailing restructuring in capitalism and the labor process. For my research I took four interrelated dimensions – space, work, employment, and time – of the labor process into account and analyzed them separately.

Several results of the dimension of space should be recognized in future research. First, territorial space continues to play an important role in the labor process.

Therefore, office space and business locations are important variables for planning and managing labor processes. Physical office space and conceptualization, for example, can reflect and reproduce global economic trends of informational capitalism and thereby directly influence workers when working in their office environment. Hence, collecting empirical data regarding the changes in office space could contribute to a better understanding of how office space could support workers in performing their tasks within informational capitalism. The discussion of outsourcing and off-shoring provided insights into the consequences of relocating production processes. Although outsourcing and off-shoring may be economically beneficial for companies, outsourcing and off-shoring are accompanied by various problems for economy and workers when preconditions do not correspond with these activities. Outsourcing and off-shoring are examples for an increasing flexibility of the labor process concerning the dimension of space. Thus, the interplay of institutional frameworks and impacts on workers when realizing outsourcing and off-shoring activities should continuously be considered in future research to be able to prevent negative outcomes for workers. After all, where businesses are located is not a trivial matter. The example of the regional labor market in Silicon Valley showed that not only globalization but also localization play an important role for restructuring the labor process regarding flexible developments of labor.

Although territorial space remains important for the labor process, an emergence of a tele-mediated information space has been observed, a phenomenon that has had considerable impact on how labor is organized. The flexible interplay of territorial and

tele-mediated information space is shaping the spatial aspects of the prevailing labor process. The current debate about the restructuring of the labor process is correctly veering toward the acknowledgment of an increasingly important role of space for economic and labor restructuring. But it also shows that a sophisticated view is important, and there is a need to acknowledge the role of the coexistence of different spaces and the flexible interplay of territorial and tele-mediated information space. The development of networks is an example of how physical and tele-mediated information space creates flexible responses, because networks are indeed an adequate organization structure for informational capitalism. Sometimes, however, one gets the impression that networks are the only adequate organizational structure for today’s labor processes, which is not necessarily true. Nevertheless, networks provide a flexible structure that is adequate for many approaches toward labor organization today. Future research concentrating not only on the development of networks but on the interplay of traditional organizational structures and modern network structures could provide important insights into what is important for a well-working interplay of old and new organizational structures.

The dimension of work is important for diagnosing recent developments in the labor process. It is a rather intangible category and not easily quantified, but it is a crucial dimension when trying to provide a comprehensive picture of the labor process.

The interviews with US and German software developers provided much information concerning the category of work. First, flexible approaches to work certainly help software developers handle their complex work tasks and work requirements. The interviewees were very much aware of the fundamental restructuring of work during the last decades. Their awareness not only involves work processes on the surface, like the constant engagement in new hardware, software, and network tools. The interviewed software developers also conveyed their awareness of the fundamental restructuring of the labor process that they experienced in more intangible ways. Their reports about the role of communication and the role of the market are examples of how aware software developers are about fundamental restructurings of the labor process. Because they know about the important role of communication in the work process and the increasingly direct impact of the market on their work, they are beginning to deal with these aspects by trying to make these influences productive for their work. They use informal communication as a strategic aspect in organizing their work. Also, they view their customers as a major variable in organizing their daily tasks. Accordingly, it seems

like there is a gentle trend towards legibility of the subsurface of the complex work processes by software developers. Whether software developers will benefit from slowly recognizing and responding to these influences and changes remains unclear and demands further qualitative research. Generally, US and German software developers have a positive attitude towards the flexibility of their work surroundings and do not complain about it. In contrast, they like the flexible changes of their work. However, the statements about their flexible employment conditions were much more critical and were accompanied by fear and the feeling of insecurity and arbitrariness. Overall, the analysis shows that the complexity of work is accompanied by flexibility of the work process.

It is widely agreed that employment has developed into being increasingly flexible. However, a disagreement exists about the need for and the consequences of this flexibility. Some individuals argue that flexible employment is necessary for staying competitive in globalized competition and globalized production structures.

They tend to overlook the negative effects on workers that result from implementing flexible employment structures. Others advise against extreme flexibility within employment relationships because of the increasing insecurity and arbitrariness for workers. The data presented in this study reveal that there are negative affects for workers due to increasing volatile and flexible employment relationships. The specific economic effects of flexible employment conditions were not the subject of this study and therefore cannot be fundamentally judged. However, the increasing polarization between unskilled workers and those with high qualifications, between employees with secure employment relationships and those in insecure employment situations is a problematic trend that seems to reinforce existing inequalities. Therefore, these trends are important topics to regard in future research, because they may provide answers helping to prevent an ever increasing polarization due to the increase in flexibility.

It became evident that the widely acknowledged organizational and structural flexibility of employment conditions and employment relationships is slowly pervading the labor process and affecting workers. An example of evidence for this observation is that employees increasingly see themselves as project workers or entrepreneurs even if they are employed full-time and have a standard employment contract. Pervasive flexibility within their employment relationship manifests in feelings of insecurity and volatility as well as in the attitude of being project-oriented. Another example of pervasive flexibility is the increasing informalization within formal employment

conditions and the interplay of flexible and bureaucratic organization principles. In formally bureaucratic organizations we find increasingly informalized structures and the coexistence of both bureaucratic and informal organization principles. Informal structures are generally more flexible than formal organization principles. In start-up companies that begin with an informal structure, bureaucratic organization structures evolve and flexible and inflexible organization principles coexist. The flexibility, thus, becomes more and more diffused within these organizations, although it is not necessary the only or most obvious organizational principle there. All in all, there is evidence that flexibility pervades institutions and education and training programs as well as management practices.

As with their awareness of flexibility in employment individuals are aware of an increasing flexible work time due to the restructuring of economy and society. This study provided evidence that flexibility in work time is increasing. This became obvious with the observation of the coexistence of various flexible work time concepts within organizations. That flexible work time concepts are per se accompanied by a better work-life balance of employees is a commonly accepted prejudice. But as evidence from recent empirical studies showed, institutional and normative frameworks play an important role in how flexible work time concepts affect the work-life balance. The institutional and normative environments need to correspond to the flexible concepts implemented in the organization. Otherwise, flexible work time concepts may have a negative effect on workers. For example, flexible work time may cause increasing stress for employees because of increased expectations and demands by employers. Whether flexible work time results from the preference of the workers or is determined by the management is correlated with the qualification level and occupational status of workers. The imposition of a flexible work time by management more often applies to workers in the lower level of the workforce and with low qualifications. With this

“passive flexibility” the worker more likely faces negative effects of flexible work time arrangements. In addition, flexible work time arrangements tend toward reinforcing the traditional gender relationship in labor processes and make the work-life balance harder to achieve instead of more easy to achieve. Although temporary employment is defined differently in the United States and Germany, it is likely in both countries that it accompanies decreasing power of workers toward their employer. The increasing importance of network organization structures and the decreasing role of companies as the organizational unit of the labor process lead to a new definition of careers. Time is

an important variable for this new understanding of careers and replaces hierarchy as the important variable defining career paths. Today, it is important to track the career path of an individual over time. Considering only the current position is not very helpful in getting an idea of the professional career of an individual, because ups and downs are common and the individual’s current situation is not significant. Moreover, a worker’s entire professional life is important in order to define a professional career today. These aspects of a modern definition of careers should be taken into account in future research.

Finally, two aspects of this study need to be highlighted. First, because the above described trends are based on empirical observation for the US and German labor processes, I was able to provide a picture beyond a specific national situation. The statements of this study do not apply to all countries, but because two countries with quite different institutional backgrounds were considered, it is possible that these trends also apply to other developed countries. This should not hide the fact that many differences within the US and German labor process and the labor market situation exist. The definition of temporary employment discussed in chapter 6 or the differences in income inequality presented in chapter 3 are only two examples of the many differences that exist. However, the overall trends regarding flexibility within these distinct setups of labor and labor markets seem to overlap in many areas. Examining four different dimensions of the labor process revealed numerous similarities, as described, in the current restructuring of the labor market.

Second, the focus on ICT in many areas of the study conveyed a sense of the significant influence technology has on labor. Many of the described trends, for example in the category of space, are in large part dependent on how modern technology is applied within the labor process. In another example, a greater flexibility in work resulting out of the application of modern ICT does not necessarily demand an increasing flexibility in employment relations. Thus, workers may appreciate a flexible work environment with constantly changing demands that are due to the application of new technology, but they may also favor a steady instead of flexible employment relationship without perpetually feeling insecure and volatile. Because software development and other IT-related occupations can be regarded as early indicators for changes, this study should have provided an impression of what other industries and occupations might face in the future.