A capabilities approach to flexible working arrangements: Understanding opportunities for combining work and care across countries, sectors and occupational backgrounds

Abstract

This dissertation examines flexible work arrangements (FWAs) through a capabilities approach, investigating whether FWAs provide substantive opportunities to combine work and care across countries, sectors, and socio-occupational backgrounds. Recognizing that workplace flexibility operates paradoxically—simultaneously enhancing autonomy while potentially intensifying work demands, blurring work-life boundaries, and reproducing inequalities—this research critically examines how national policies, collective agreements, and occupational contexts function as conversion factors that either enable or constrain workers' capabilities to achieve valued work-care combinations, particularly among fathers. Drawing on Amartya Sen's capability approach, the dissertation demonstrates that formal rights to flexible working do not automatically translate into substantive opportunities, as various structural factors mediate between policy resources and workers' actual ability to work flexibly. Chapter 2 provides a cross-national comparison of FWA policy design in the Netherlands, Spain, and Slovenia. The Netherlands offers universal scope FWA provision through national legislation, providing broader availability and accessibility regardless of caregiving responsibilities. Spain shows conditional availability tied to care responsibilities, with collective bargaining playing a significant role in negotiating and improving provisions. Slovenia largely leaves provision to individual negotiation, also conditional on care responsibilities. These findings demonstrate that when FWAs are conditional on care responsibilities rather than universal, they reinforce gender inequalities by framing flexibility as women's accommodation of caregiving rather than as a general employment right. Chapter 3 examines the relationship between collective bargaining and FWA provision in Spain and the Netherlands using data from 209 collective agreements. Spain includes FWA clauses more frequently than the Netherlands, reflecting how minimum statutory provision creates opportunities for collective innovation. However, FWA inclusion is mainly related to the proportion of highly skilled workers and union density rather than workforce characteristics like gender composition. Knowledge-intensive services and manufacturing sectors show the highest inclusion, while female-dominated sectors such as education and health show lower rates despite high union density, indicating that collective bargaining can replicate inequalities between highly skilled and less skilled workers. Chapter 4 quantitatively explores how fathers' flexible working capabilities are associated with their share of childcare responsibility across financial situations using survey data from fathers and mothers across the Netherlands, Slovenia, Spain, and the UK. Spatial flexibility significantly increases fathers' likelihood of assuming primary childcare responsibility, while temporal flexibility shows no association. Financial circumstances function as fundamental conversion factors: financially struggling fathers are significantly more likely to be primary caregivers and benefit most from spatial flexibility, with their probability of primary childcare responsibility increasing when they have the capability to work from home. Chapter 5 provides qualitative insights through interviews with fathers across the same four European countries, revealing systematic occupational-class differences. Managerial and professional fathers report substantial flexibility but often use flexibility to intensify work commitment. Fathers in routine white-collar, service, and blue-collar occupations face rigid schedules and limited autonomy, relying on strategies like 'tag-team parenting'. This dissertation shows that simply offering flexible work ‘for all’ is not enough, policies that address why some workers face barriers others do not are needed. Without this, flexible work risks widening gender and class inequalities.