Abstract:
This thesis concerns the relatively recent phenomenon of part-time managers
and professionals. The focus is the part-time working arrangement (PTWA) and
specifically the process by which it emerges and develops, building on existing
literature on working-hours preferences, the role of the organization in part-time
working and alternative work organization for temporal flexibility. Two large
private-sector organizations, each operating in the UK and the Netherlands,
provided four different research sites for narrative interviews with 39 part-time
managers and professionals.
The key contribution to knowledge is to identify the process of developing a
PTWA as a combination of the formal negotiation of a flexibility task i-deal and
an informal process of job crafting. In a situation of high constraint – where the
individual’s goals conflict with organizational norms and expectations – the
tensions between ‘being part-time’ and ‘being professional’ necessitated identity
work at each stage, as individuals constructed a ‘provisional self’ which in turn
enclosed each stage of the development of the PTWA. The four stages were:
first, evaluation of alternative options, including postponing the transition to part-
time until more appropriate circumstances arise; secondly, preparation of the
individual business case for part-time; thirdly, formal negotiation of a flexibility
task i-deal; and finally an informal, unauthorized adaptation of the arrangement
over time. Collaborative crafting of working practices (predictability,
substitutability, knowledge management) provided greater opportunities for
adaptation than individual activities.
This study’s contribution to theory in the nascent field of part-time managers
and professionals is a process model which suggests how three sets of
discourses act as generative mechanisms at each stage of the emergence and
development of the PTWA, creating or destroying ‘action spaces’. These
discourses are: the perceived ‘nature’ of managerial and professional work, the
perception of part-time as a personal lifestyle choice, and the understanding of
part-timers as either ‘other’ or the ‘new normal’.
