Paper short abstract:

This paper seeks to evaluate current ideas about flexibility from an anthropological perspective. We propose that ethnographic work is well placed to explore the different values and contextual meanings ascribed to flexibility, thus making it possible for ambivalent flexibilities to be evoked.

Paper long abstract:

This paper seeks to evaluate ideas about flexibility which emerge from current social theories from an anthropological perspective. It explores the key critiques of notions of flexibility, focusing particularly on feminist sociological critiques. Perhaps most crucially, these include the proposition that flexibility is hegemonic, and that it continually produces subjects who are unable to be flexible. In other words, the priviledged status of flexibility, along with reflexivity, mobility, and individualisation, in so much of contemporary life, masks the ways in which these processes generate a series of exclusions.

This paper proposes that anthropology, and in particular ethnographic exploration, is well placed to reveal the varied ways in which different elements of hegemonic flexibility emerge in people's daily lives. Through appropriating, and being appropriated by, particular locations and histories, ideas of flexibility work in articulation, and sometimes in competition, with each other. This paper will draw attention to the different values and contextual meanings ascribed to flexibility, thus making it possible for different modes of flexibility to be evoked in different contexts. The political effects of this ambivalence will be explored, including a consideration of how these conditions allow flexibility to be positive and affirming, as well as exploitative and exclusionary.