“Uncomfortable When Not Seen’” – Governmentality, Flexible Working and Self-Control

In this paper we develop an understanding of how flexible working, a specific system of management, produces workers amenable to being managed and controlled from a distance, and willing to assume responsibility for managing themselves. While the extant research typically associates flexible working with positive outcomes leading to employees’ increased autonomy or, contrarily, deplores harnessing individual autonomy for organizational benefit, it rarely explores the ways through which freedom may manifest itself as management-of-the-self. Moreover, the extant research has yet to explain the mechanism translating employee agency into self-control in the context of flexible working. Drawing on the classic works by Foucault on subjectification as well as by Miller and Rose on governmentality, we show that flexible working may exemplify a system of government espousing a dearth of knowledge and void of control, thus creating conditions of possibility conducive to assuming a desired subject position – an ideal flexible worker – in a free, but calculated manner. Through our ethnographically-inspired abductive analysis of an empirical case study set in a British local authority (MoCo), we contribute to the theorization of those mechanisms that explain flexible workers’ willingness to be managed to the point where it reveals itself as unsolicited self-sacrifice.