Two Kinds of Rigidity: Corporate Communities and Collectivism

Abstract

Of all the virtues in the managerial calendar; of all the buzz-words used in the managerial literature to describe the proper preoccupations of those who seek to improve their industrial performance, the word ‘flexibility’ must surely be among the most frequent. It has become so — over the last decade — because its antonym, ‘rigidity’, became, in the early 1980s, the favourite word of the neoclassical economists in their attacks on the various deviations from free market liberalism, the curable market imperfections, which they saw as responsible for economic stagnation in the western economies — for, in particular, the disease of Eurosclerosis.