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Perhaps the key word for anyone who has been at the sharp end of modern employment practices, is flexibility, which is always enumerated as one of the defining characteristics. Frank Webster (1995) suggests that the term covers the following three types of flexibility:

• Flexibility of employees:

No employee can look forward to a lifetime of employment any more and certainly not necessarily in the same profession; we are, to use the current clichés, in a learning society in which lifetime training and multi-skilling are the norm;

Time flexibility is widespread - employees are appointed on fixed term contracts, some even on a series of weekly contracts, which means that employers have no responsibility for sick pay, holiday pay and other benefits; increasingly employees' hours are not fixed, except within a very broad framework and weekend working or working on public holidays no longer attracts overtime payments.

• Flexibility of production:

Information networks tend to break down the hierarchical and inflexible structures of the organization. For example, computerized stock control which automatically places orders with suppliers when stocks are low, makes it unnecessary for manufacturers or supermarkets to carry large supplies of stock, thus saving on warehousing, the employment costs of warehousemen and the costs of unsold stock. Instead, just-in-time (JIT) methods are used whereby the supplier constantly tops up a minimal amount of stock held by the manufacturer or supermarket. Where manufacturing is concerned, modern computerized methods of production make it possible for suppliers economically to produce relatively small runs of products to meet their customers' needs. Without the information technology, JIT methods would be impossible. 

• Flexibility of consumption:  

The new technologies make shorter production runs cost-effective, which means that products can be more 'individualized' than the 'mass' consumption products of the past, allowing consumers greater flexibility in their 'lifestyle choices'. The new flexibility of consumption has led advertising agencies to pay less attention to the socio-economic groups - social 'classes' - which were formerly seen as reasonably reliable predictors of behavior and attitudes and more attention to lifestyles, as people break away from the conventional patterns which once characterized their belonging to a particular class, constructing differentiated lifestyles for themselves through the pattern of choices they make as consumers.

Some theorists, as has been said above, have considered these developments to be radically new.