Tom Vander Steene

The impact of the institutional context on the politics of flexibility: comparison Belgium‐The Netherlands

In this paper we evaluate the impact of the institutional context on the politics of flexibility. We examine whether differences in institutional embedding lead to differences in the way in which companies seek to achieve flexibility. Belgium and The Netherlands were selected for comparison on the reasons for their different flexibility mix. The conclusions are based on both a macro‐economic analysis of national statistics and a micro‐economic analysis of organisations in both countries. The main conclusion is that the institutional frameworks of Belgium and The Netherlands have been built up along different lines. Dutch legislation encourages contractual flexibility. The Belgian institutional context focuses more on temporal flexibility. A competition for the greatest flexibility has little point given these observations. It is not a question of more or less, but of different flexibility. A wider significance of the comparison is that it clearly demonstrates that evaluations fail if the different components of the institutional framework and flexibility are not studied in their close mutual interrelationship.