Flexibility means instantly adapting labor and machinery to market demand

Evidence

”Employability” is synonymous with flexibility. We recall that flexibility, a management watchword since the seventies, means above all the possibility of instantly adapting productive apparatus and labor to the evolution of demand. It thus becomes, in a single stroke, a necessary quality of both managers and employees. — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 154

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes flexibility’s 1970s management lineage before distinguishing it from plasticity.
• XREF: Connects to Boltanski and Chiapello’s ‘new spirit of capitalism’ cited later — flexibility discourse’s provenance. — connects to: Flexible specialization decouples production technology from dedicated single models — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 503; Flexible production bypassed Fordist rigidity to serve quick-changing markets — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 936; Smart scheduling replaces stable workforces with unpredictable just-in-time temp shifts (+3 more)