Flexibility and the Individual in the Late Modernity

Abstract

Flexibility is a key word of contemporary modernity: sociologists, as well as other social scientists, employ the term in order to explain the new patterns labour organisation and labour market have recently assumed. As a key term of late modernity, flexibility has acquired an overall semantic relevance: which means that the term flexibility may be adopted in order to understand the “liquid” character of both social structure and individual biography. Indeed, the term has also assumed a somewhat ideological character: flexibility, intended by most as a way to foster a more rational organisation of work, actually legitimates new forms of social exclusion, ideologically disguised as effectiveness and efficiency of economical strategies.