ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a critical evaluation of post-Fordist-era flexibility, making the case that flexible innovations in manual and professional occupations embody principles of scientific management not fully manifested in Fordist-era production. In the empirical part of the analysis, it uses data derived from workplace ethnographies conducted over the past 80 years to investigate how the mounting influence of scientific management has altered manual and professional/managerial work. Temporary outsourcing and production teams, both key to the application of neo-Taylorism to professional/ managerial occupations, increased significantly. Flexible innovations reflecting an increasingly rigorous application of scientific management have contributed to a general deterioration of conditions in both manual and professional/managerial work, contention that bifurcation in incomes is not necessarily accompanied by bifurcation in work arrangements, and that job content changes do not necessarily mirror income trajectories, at least not in a straight forward fashion.
