Introduction

Who doesn't want to have the freedom to choose where to work and when to work? This seems like a no-brainer. As human beings, most, if not all of us, are naturally inclined to love having more control over our lives. Control over our work is bound to let us shape work around other demands of our lives, our family lives, our hobbies and other pursuits. It should potentially expand our leisure and let us enjoy our lives outside of work more. Right? Then why is it that the groups with the most control over their work, such as academics or software programmers, who are given the freedom to work whenever and wherever they wish, end up working excessive hours (Bothwell, 2018)? This book is about exactly this – the flexibility paradox – why freedom leads to even more self-exploitation – or to quote Orwell, ‘Freedom is Slavery’. Why when workers have more control over their work, they end up working all the time and everywhere. Why when workers get access to unlimited holidays, they end up taking less. Why despite the myth of academics getting three months off in summer, many academics end up struggling to spend even a fortnight on vacation.

This isn't just about academics. As the later chapters (Chapter 5 to 7) will show, this is a phenomenon that cuts across a larger group of the population and resonate with many people. I’ve realised how much this is the case when my think piece – ‘Flexible working is making us work longer’ – gained an incredible amount of attention in 2016, with many people commenting on how the story I wrote reflected their own experience of working flexibly, regardless of what they did and where they lived. So why does this happen? To better understand the flexibility paradox, why more control over our work leads to more self-exploitation, it is important to understand the larger societal context in which flexible working was/is being introduced. What this book sets out to explain is that the freedom and control over your work isn't really freedom away from work largely due to the context in which we live in, namely, a work-centric society, where passion at work is expected and where traditional gender norms prevail.