ABSTRACT
Although there is a broad consensus today regarding the need to reconcile flexibility and security, there is profound disagreement with respect to the means to be used in achieving it. One widely held idea is to situate flexibility internally within the enterprise, in the economic sphere, and to situate security externally within the social sphere. Security thus functions as an external shock absorber of the social consequences of an enterprise's flexibility. Whatever might be their particular nuances, the discourses on ‘flexicurity’ adopt this logic of externalisation. But there is an alternative conception that refuses to limit the question of security to employment, extending it to work and the internal workings of an enterprise.
